


With Heads Held Low

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29558973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: In which our heroes work through their issues by helping others with theirs.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. To The Faithful Departed

**Author's Note:**

> After a miserable and demotivating couple of months, I promised myself I'd attempt the February challenge over on Hurt/Comfort Bingo. The result: this little snippet of healing through helping.
> 
> prompts: therapy, comfort food/feeding someone (wild card), estrangement, witch hunt

***

Tripitaka may not be a real monk, but there are still times when she needs to play the part.

Not ‘Tripitaka’. Not the hope of humanity, the holy human hero prophesied to wake the Monkey King and lead the world out of its demon-enforced darkness. Not the mythical figure whose robes still don’t always fit properly, whose name still catches sometimes under her tongue and behind her teeth, whose title still occasionally feels too heavy even after so much time spent learning how to carry it well.

Which is to say: not _the_ monk, but _a_ monk.

Monasteries are in short supply these days, and shorter still are the supplies of holy men and women to fill them. Not all demons have the business sense and social savvy of Princess Locke, who ‘graciously’ allowed the humans to keep their prayer shrines and holy sanctums, who turned a blind eye to their worship because it kept them quiet and in line; further afield, what few sanctuaries remain standing are left empty and in disrepair, the monks and priests who once occupied them long since banished, forced into hiding, or simply killed.

There is faith enough to be found, even out here, but so few vessels to hold it and so few souls to tend it.

Oftentimes, there is only one.

Tripitaka will never be a monk in truth, for more reasons than she’d care to think about, but there are times and places where the simple cut of her robes carries far more power than the holy gleam of her name.

She doesn’t really mind it as much as she pretends to.

She definitely doesn’t mind it as much as her gods do.

Monkey, who hates any kind of delay or diversion for any reason, taps his foot and folds his arms and complains endlessly. He doesn’t understand, and he lacks the patience to try, and so he grumbles and sulks and causes a fuss when she decides to stop at a village in need or a town in turmoil, when she pleads and implores and finally plants her heels and insists that they spend the night and give what little aid they ( _she_ ) can to those who have so little and want for so much. He hates that they stop at all, and he hates all the more that they give so much of themselves every time: their supplies, their time, and most of all their compassion.

“It’s just pointless,” he mutters, every time without fail. “Every minute we spend in run-down nowhere hovels like this, we could be getting closer to the next scroll. We could be helping hundreds, monk, while you’re wasting your time helping one here and one there.”

True enough, perhaps. But sometimes it pays, in the maelstrom and the chaos of the bigger picture, to not lose sight of the smaller details.

So she tells him, anyway, smiling with strained patience and gently pointing out, “Those hundreds are all made up of ‘one here and one there’.”

It’s not quite enough to get him to stop complaining, but at least he saves the bulk of it for when the worst of the lost souls are out of earshot.

Sandy, supportive in spirit but vividly uncomfortable within the closed walls of a holy sanctum, is more understanding but less present. She smiles, shaky but sincere, and says, “You do good work, Tripitaka,” then turns around and flees like the place is on fire, not to be seen again until the sun has long since set. Unable to stay still, unable to expose herself, perhaps simply unable to exist in a place so full of holiness and light after a lifetime of voices calling her a demon: an affront to both of those things.

If she had the time to spare, Tripitaka might feel sorry for her. Might try to talk to her about it, even. But they are here for a reason, and any time spent fretting over her companions is time taken away from those who need her compassion more. Her gods can take care of themselves; they’ve proven it countless times, and she has no cause to worry even about the weakest of them. And so she leaves Sandy alone, trusting that she’ll stay safe, and settles for being grateful that at least one of them can keep her feelings to herself.

It’s a lot more than she can say for Pigsy, who is even less tactful than Monkey in making his dissatisfaction known.

Frankly, by now, Tripitaka would expect better of him.

He is nearly as uncomfortable as Sandy is in holy spaces, though in his case the unease comes with good reason: his past misdemeanours may not be well known to the strangers they encounter out here in the provinces, but he knows them well enough himself and the guilt is like a scabbing wound he can’t seem to stop scratching.

“Don’t know that I’d be welcome here,” he murmurs in her ear, hovering behind her like a gloom-heavy shadow. “Not exactly a shining beacon of faith and morality, am I?”

True enough: he’s a glutton and a sybarite, and he would need to do a whole lot more good than he has to wash himself clean of the terrible things he once did in the name of comfort. But true as it may be, that doesn’t deplete what good deeds he has done, nor does it make those who come to this place any less in need of their help.

“There’s plenty of good you can do here,” she reminds him, with none of the gentleness she saves for those more worthy. “That’s reason enough for you to be welcome, don’t you think?”

He hums, mulling it over for a beat or two, then sighs and shakes his head. Just as he did the last time. And the time before the, and the time before that. Just as he always does, every time.

“Maybe next time, eh?” he says, invariably, inevitably.

And off he goes, shuffling over to the nearest altar to see if there are any offerings worth ‘liberating’.

Tripitaka could say a few things about that, too. But, again, she has more important work to do here.

She may not be a monk in truth. But the people who come to this place are in desperate need of one. And so, like the name Tripitaka, she wraps the word around herself, and makes it her own.

*

Some places are worse than others.

The good places — usually the ones where word has spread of the resistance and its work, where even the boldest demons think twice before causing trouble and even the most fragile-hearted humans rally around each other with newfound courage and strength — don’t need much. A few hours, a few smiles, a little encouragement for those whose faith is wavering, and then she’s done. The good places lean harder on ‘Tripitaka’ than ‘monk’, on her name and Monkey’s reputation to carry them through; they don’t need succour, they just need reassurance.

The bad places...

Desolate, desperate, despairing. What those people need, can so rarely give. Her best efforts amount to so little in places like that, barely more than whispers against the storms of sobs and screams and so much unspeakable suffering.

It’s never enough, what little she does in the bad places.

She tries, though. In vain, maybe, but still she has to try.

It’s barely more than a hamlet, the place they’re resting now. Fifteen years ago, so the locals say, it was a thriving town, moderately sized and teeming with trade and community. Now it’s a scattered collection of skeletal houses and abandoned stores, the few who aren’t yet dead holding on by their fingernails to the remains of the place they call home.

Just under a month ago, they fought off the latest in a decade-long series of raids and attacks. Defiant to the very last, Tripitaka has no doubt that these few impossibly brave souls would throw themselves into their graves before they would abandon this place to the demons who would raze it to the ground. She admires their spirit, and she pities their souls.

There is no monastery here, but there is desperate need of a monk.

They’ve been here for nearly a full week, she and her gods, holed up in one of the old storehouses long since left to rot and decay. It’s draughty, damp, and miserable, but it serves well as a makeshift prayer-house and the little shrine-candles donated by some of the more generous villagers have given the place an air of being much more holy than it is.

It’s more than they have for themselves, these people who would surrender their own light so that this place might shine. Tripitaka accepts it, and makes it a temporary haven with gratitude and with grace.

She hasn’t seen Sandy in three days. Using her unsettling appearance as an advantage for once, she’s taken up a round-the-clock vigil at the village gates, watching out for demons and scaring away any unsavoury types who happen to pass close by. They haven’t spoken since their arrival, but Tripitaka knows her well enough to guess that she’s content out there on her own, happy to be doing something useful and relieved not to be forced to pretend she’s comfortable in the company of strangers.

Monkey, unsurprisingly, is not content at all, nor does he pretend to be comfortable. He’s been pawing at the ground from the moment they arrived, and his impatience has only grown more insufferable as the days have stretched on. Tripitaka understands his frustration — they have, after all, been here much longer than usual, and he’s never had much in the way of dignity — but his complaining is bitter, unrepentant, and insensitive; in the company of desperate souls who have lost so much already, it almost makes her want to use the crown sutra to silence him.

“I’m just _saying_ ,” he ‘just says’ for the fourteenth time in the last hour, “we’re not helping these people by sitting around and talking at them. You want to make sure they’re safe from demons, you go out there and smash the demons! Waving your hand and pretending you can keep them safe through the ‘power of positive thinking’ or whatever is stupid.”

Tripitaka swallows a sigh. “It’s not stupid to bolster their faith,” she explains, also for the fourteenth time. “Just because _you_ don’t have any...”

“I have plenty of faith.” He flexes his biceps. “I have faith in my fists. I have faith in my staff. I have faith in stuff I can actually _do_. You’re just sitting around and telling these sad nobodies what they want to hear.”

It does feel that way sometimes, even Tripitaka can’t deny. So many of the people here have been running for so long on nothing but faith, they don’t need much more than a word from a monk to rekindle its power.

 _“Your struggles are not in vain,”_ she tells one, and he leaves with a smile, believing that he’s been blessed.

 _“No,”_ she reassures another, _“you did not fail the ones you couldn’t save: you protected the ones you could.”_

To her own ears it sounds cheap and hollow, perhaps even laughable, but the young woman’s eyes light up like new life has just been breathed into her whole body.

It is so little, but it means so much.

A word, a smile, a hand on a shoulder or a kiss on a forehead: these things have real power. Raised as she was by the kinds of holy men and women she only pretends to be, Tripitaka has seen first-hand the miracles a monk’s word can perform in places such as this.

Pigsy, not surprisingly, sides with Monkey.

“He’s right, you know,” he remarks, later that evening, as they’re preparing to lay down for another long night on cold, half-rotted floorboards. His voice is softer, lower than Monkey’s, and he’s at least respectful enough to make sure there’s no-one around to overhear, but Tripitaka can hear too well the selfishness behind his feigned rationality, and it rankles. “Talking only gets you so far in a world like ours, you know?”

Tripitaka does know, and she is not afraid to dig her heels in and stand her ground. Perhaps once she would have deferred, the meek human girl she once was surrounded by smarter, wiser, worldlier gods, but those days are behind them all and it has been a long time since she stepped back from what she knew was right simply because Monkey or Pigsy weren’t having fun.

“We’re not here to offer protection,” she reminds him — and Monkey as well, eavesdropping less-than-subtly from his bedroll. “We’re here to offer succour.”

Comfort, she means, and compassion. Not a preventative for future wounds — not even a monk could promise that — but a bandage for the ones already open and bleeding.

Pigsy runs the word over his tongue a couple of times: _succour_ , like he’s not entirely convinced she didn’t make the word up on the spot just to reinforce her point.

“I’m just _saying_ ,” he says, sounding so much like Monkey that Tripitaka is halfway tempted to smack him for his tone. “It’s nice that you’re taking the monk stuff seriously and all, and I’m glad you think it’s doing some good. But we’ve got a quest to get back to.”

“This is part of the quest,” Tripitaka insists quietly.

Pigsy grunts. “Not the important part.” He sighs, then, and softens. “Look. I get the whole tending-to-those-in-need thing. I get that it kind of comes with the robes and all that. But maybe don’t forget why you’re wearing them in the first place? You know, the whole chosen-by-heaven, saviour-of-the-known-world, Tripitaka-prophecy thing?”

“Right,” Monkey grouches from his corner, pulling a moth-eaten blanket tighter about his shoulders. “You’re a holy name, not a therapist for sad little humans.”

He spits the last part like an insult, curling his lip like it’s something to be ashamed of: _therapist_ and _human_ both. Tripitaka thinks about chiding him for that, but why waste her breath when she knows he’ll never change his perspective?

In any case, he’s wrong. What else is a monk, if not a voice of comfort, a compassionate ear and a supportive shoulder for those who have nothing else?

Experience has taught her better than to try and argue, though. Not with Pigsy when he’s tired and hungry-cranky, and certainly not with Monkey when he’s restless and bored and irritable; they may be gods, both of them powerful beyond her mortal imagining, both carrying of them over a thousand years’ worth of experience, triumphs, and battle-scars, but sometimes they act so much like sulking teenage boys she has to wonder how much a thousand years is really worth to them, with their lives stretching out more or less for all eternity.

One would think it ought to breed a little bit of compassion in them.

One would hope, at least.

She sighs, shakes her head, and pulls her own blanket over her head.

*

There’s a woman, not more than fifty years of age, who comes by every day.

Weary of body, sickly of spirit and soul, she kneels at Tripitaka’s feet each morning and lays bare her heart and its pain. Seeking comfort, like the rest, but neither one of them know of what sort; Tripitaka’s replies, as kind and tender as she can make them, provide little succour to one whose faith has been tested and shaken too many times to believe, and her wounds are too deep to be balmed by a simple touch or a moment in prayer.

She is the only one left of her family; this she explained on the very first day.

Her husband she lost some years ago, in one of the earliest raids. A warrior by chance, she said, eyes gleaming with tears, and a protector by choice; they fought together side by side, but where she would survive to fight again there was not enough left of him to bury. His ashes fertilised the soil in their little garden, giving food and strength to his wife and daughter as they wept and grieved and mourned.

Her daughter, a blossoming young woman at the start, aged long before her time. Made into a fighter before she was even fifteen, she had more blood on her hands by the time she was Tripitaka’s age than Tripitaka has seen in all her time on the quest. Almost a full decade, she fought at her mother’s side, wielding her father’s sword, protecting her home, her family, until—

Until now.

“I had to turn the blade myself,” the woman says, the words clogged with silent tears. “She would have suffered for days if I hadn’t.” And she looks up at Tripitaka with wide, wet eyes, searching not for hollow words of faith but for the truth: “Does that make me her killer?”

Tripitaka grasps her shoulder, squeezes gently.

“You ended her suffering,” she says, keeping her voice as strong and steady as a monk’s must always be, no matter what horrors may churn in her heart. “You were a good mother.”

The woman bows her head; drops of water fall to stain her knuckles, gnarled and worn from years of hard use and fighting. “A good mother would have sent her far away from here.”

Tripitaka’s heart seizes, her monk’s compassion clashing against the still-deep grief of a could-have-been-daughter.

She thinks of her own mother: nameless and faceless, a distant spirit housed behind her ribs. She never knew her and she probably never will; the little time she spent at the North Water, letting herself believe she’d found her after all — aborted in the worst possible way through deceit and betrayal — helped her to make peace with the idea of that ‘never’.

She doesn’t know, probably will never know, what it means to be a mother’s daughter. It has never been easy, but it hurts less now than it once did; she accepts it, just as she accepts every other piece of herself, the good and the bad in equal measure. It is what it is, and she couldn’t change it without changing all of herself; she knows this, she understands it, she has learned to accept it.

But still, in spite of all that, there are days when she can’t help but wonder, when the hollow space in her chest is greater than the part of her that knows better, when she looks up at the star-spotted sky and lets herself long for what she has lost.

Not today.

Today she hears the words of another mother, one who mourns a daughter she could not save, and she sees a different side to the story she always thought she knew so well, the words printed on paper that brought her so much sweetness and sorrow as a child.

Today she sees her mother not through the eyes of the lost and lonely daughter but through the fear and pain that spreads like poison in a place like this, the heavy weight of the choice she made: to send her child away, so that she might save her life.

And it was a good life. The Scholar, far kinder as a father than he was as a teacher, raised her well and tended her with care, not like one of his disciples but truly as his daughter. She was warm, fed, protected; she was _loved_ , and she never once had any reason to doubt it.

She knows now — as she never really did growing up, watching the world pass by through the eyes of a sheltered child — just how lucky she is to be able to say all that.

When she was young, she never imagined she would one day follow in the Scholar’s footsteps. In truth, she suspects, neither did he: not even a visionary like himself could have foreseen the tragedy that led to her taking on the mantle of Tripitaka, and she flatters herself that she knows — _knew_ — him well enough to know he would have done everything in his power to keep her safe if he suspected for even a moment that such horrors would come that night.

He loved her. He would have protected her if he could.

Just as her mother protected her, in sending her away from a place that was too dangerous for a newborn baby.

Just as this grieving woman wishes she could have done for her child, even years after she grew up into a woman.

Tripitaka looks down at her now, grateful for the bowed head, the hunched shoulders, the obscuring of her vision, grateful that the woman who comes to her for succour cannot see the moment of weakness on her face.

She is supposed to be unshakeable here in this makeshift monastery. She is supposed to be a rock, a solid space offering faith and comfort to those who so desperately need them; it would bring this grieving mother no comfort, she’s certain, to look up and see in a monk’s face the eyes of a girl who was given the very same freedom she could not give her own.

Tripitaka says, willing her voice not to waver and give her away, “Your daughter was a grown woman. She could have left if she chose.”

The mother barks a bitter laugh; thick with grief and bitter with the most profound self-loathing. “She would never have left me alone.”

“That’s a credit to you,” Tripitaka says. “Not a failing.”

She thinks briefly of her friends, her gods. She thinks of Monkey whose Master would have given anything to turn him away from the path of self-destruction he was stumbling into, and of Sandy whose father threw her away like so much unwanted waste the moment he realised what she was. 

One good parent and one awful one, and she has watched the aftermath of both those lives playing out in her gods’ eyes more times than any of them can count.

It is not difficult at all to guess where on the spectrum this woman would fall, or what her daughter would have to say about her, if she were here to voice her feelings.

The woman raises her head, looks up at her with dark, wet eyes. “I would sooner have failings than credits,” she says, “if it meant I would have my child back.”

Tripitaka knows that feeling well. Too well, much too well: it is a greater struggle than she can bear, trying to keep it from touching her face and giving her heart away.

She is Tripitaka. The name, the robes, the quest: these things are her life. She has fought and fought, with everything she has in her, to be worthy of them. It means everything to her, more than than she’ll ever be able to put into words, but she would give it all up in an instant — the name and the quest, everything, without even a moment’s hesitation — if that was what it took to bring the Scholar back.

She would become a nameless girl again and never regret it for a second. She would become unknown, become unimportant; she would make herself insignificant, even invisible, if it would give her even just one more day in the Scholar’s old monastery, rolling her eyes and pouting as he shoos her away and sets her to work on her studies.

“I understand,” she hears herself choke out. “I—”

But that is as far as she will allow herself to go.

She is a monk. At least, she’s supposed to be one.

She is supposed to be filling that role, playing that part, earning the robes and the prayer beads and the name. It is her place to offer faith and strength, to be kind and caring but impartial; it is not her place to share her sorrows, to pour out her losses and griefs onto a woman already struggling so much under her own.

A monk is not so far from a therapist, whatever Monkey or Pigsy may think or say. There is danger in being too open with her own emotions in the company of suffering strangers who come to her in search of guidance and comfort, in search of warm words and kind hands, of smiles and squeezed shoulders and solace.

She holds her tongue.

She looks down to the kneeling, grieving mother, this woman so desperate for a form of comfort she cannot provide, and tries to find something a little more appropriate to say.

They’ve been here so many times already, she thinks. Days now, they’ve played out this moment, staring at each other, neither one really knowing how to respond to the other, and what good has it brought either one of them?

Tripitaka wants to help. She wants it more than anything. But she doesn’t know what to say, can’t pierce the haze of grief and loss and injustice, cannot see a way to balm those things and make them easier to bear. Her own experience tells her this wound will be open for a long time, that healing will come but come slowly, and she doesn’t know how to put that truth into words that offer reprieve and succour.

She doesn’t know how to silence the hard-earned experience of the girl who wears the robes and become instead the monk who deserves them.

She opens her mouth, then closes it again, stifling a drained sigh.

The woman, gazing up at her from her knees, breathes, “Do you?”

Tripitaka frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

A moment’s quiet, and then the woman musters a watery smile. It is the saddest, shakiest little thing Tripitaka has ever seen, but burning faintly behind the shimmer of tears is something she has never seen in this poor broken woman, not in all the time she’s been here:

 _Hope_.

“Do you?” she asks again, shakier and softer than before. “Understand?”

The question, complete now, holds power; it seems to crack the ground.

Tripitaka doesn’t know how to answer. Her instincts and time spent as a monk — false, perhaps, but worldly and knowledgeable even so — tell her to hold her distance, to keep herself apart from the emotions gleaming teardrop-dark in the eyes of a woman who has known only pain and strife for too long. She’s a _monk_ , she tells herself again; it is not her place to lay bare her own experiences.

Oh, but the look in her eyes now is something new and different, a light for the first time in so much darkness. It is something that could, with a little tending and a little nurturing, become brighter and more beautiful, become a start to healing.

She can tend it, but not with the impersonal placations she’s been using until now. _Your struggles are not in vain_ holds no power over this woman’s aching heart; she needs something real, something true.

Perhaps this lost soul is not in search of succour, after all. Perhaps all she wants is someone to share her grief and loss, someone to _understand_. A reminder, perhaps, that she doesn’t have to grieve alone.

She has lost everyone that ever mattered to her; what was once a beautiful, loving family is now a dead, dry desert and she the only thing left alive. Every shoulder she might once have cried on, every heart she once held close, every smile that could have given her the comfort she needs in these most painful, most trying moments, all of them gone. There is no-one left for her now; what comfort could she get from the empty words of a passing stranger?

But someone who has been there herself? A girl, not a monk, someone who shows empathy not through the detached thoughts and words of a faceless therapist, but from her own heart, her own spirit and soul, her own _grief_...

Tripitaka thinks of her mother, faceless too in her own way, and of the Scholar, whose face still fills her every waking thought in memory and in dreams. Two lost parents, in not-so-very-different circumstances, and the only comfort she has is the hope — no, the _faith_ — that the path she’s chosen to walk would make them both proud.

She pulls off the prayer beads she’s taken to wearing when offering succour to the needy in places like this. She loosens her scarf and her robes, becomes less of a monk and more of a girl — more of _herself_ — then lowers her body to the ground, kneeling with respect beside her companion.

Equal now, not a monk and her charge but two women, one old and one young, sitting face to face. Tripitaka takes her hands, summons a sincere smile, and readies her heart to crack open.

“Yes,” she says, letting this stranger’s raw grief wrap itself up in the gentler, more familiar colours of her own. “I understand.”

*

They remain in the village for two more days.

The woman still comes to see her every morning, but her visits have become something different now, something new. No longer a grieving mother kneeling before a monk in search of comfort that will not come, instead she comes now to sit side-by-side with a grieving daughter who barely remembers one parent and who misses the other with every breath in her body.

They sit together, both of them, equals who have both grieved and mourned and been left behind by those they loved more than anything, who both understand what it is to move on after the loss of a family.

Tripitaka listens more than she speaks, even now, but she learns over the course of the woman’s visits that there is a kind of comfort as well, for both of them, to be found in letting her own grief flood to the surface once in a while. She learns to harness the healing power of shared tears, not just for her companion but for herself as well.

She is here to offer succour, not to receive it, but by the time they make preparations to leave she thinks perhaps she’s found a little of her own as well, even so.

Monkey doesn’t notice. He’s so relieved to be back on the road again, she doubts he would notice if she’d coloured her robes bright pink and started speaking in tongues.

Sandy, in her usual shy-subtle manner, only remarks, “You’re looking well, Tripitaka,” then ducks her head and doesn’t speak again for another three hours.

Pigsy...

Pigsy doesn’t say anything until they’re several leagues away with a full day’s worth of travelling behind them, until the sun is beginning to scrape the horizon on its descent, until the two of them are more or less alone, setting up camp for the night while Monkey checks the surrounding forest for threats and Sandy gathers water from a nearby stream.

He waits, biding his time with far greater patience than she’d normally expect from him, and when he finally does bring it up it he does it so carefully and with such uncharacteristic tact she almost doesn’t realise what he’s doing.

“So,” he murmurs, amicable and easy-going in his usual way. “Back out in the blasted wilderness, eh? Nothing but the stars and the trees to shelter us from the elements.”

Tripitaka chuckles, lightly teasing. “Is that your way of admitting there might be some benefits to spending a week or two in places where there’s a roof over our heads?”

Pigsy’s smile turns stealthier. “Some ‘benefits’.”

It’s pointed, the way he says it, tactful and clever but not exactly subtle. Tripitaka rolls her eyes, smiles wryly, and says, just as pointedly, “You know we did good work there.”

“Starting to see that, yeah.” Spoken playfully, as is his wont, but with a note of sobriety underneath. “You’re glowing brighter than I’ve seen you in a good long while. Whatever you did for those poor folks back there, I reckon they did a touch of something for you too.”

And there it is: still playful but with deeper purpose.

Tripitaka lets her smile soften. “I suppose they did.”

“Good.” Pigsy softens a little bit too, but it’s different on him; even his softer edges still have the keen edges of centuries’ worth of living. “Too bloody giving, you are. It’s nice to see you getting a little something back now and then.”

There’s weight to that, Tripitaka thinks, and for a long moment she’s not quite sure how to respond.

She recalls, wincing a little, the way he shies away from holy places, the way he chooses the easy path every time, hiding from generosity and judgement both.

She says, very carefully, “You should try it sometimes.”

His laughter is strained, more effortful than he probably wants her to see. “Not really my thing.”

She knows that; he’s said it many times. Still...

“There’s something to be said,” she presses, gentle but firm, “for kindness as a gift all its own.”

Pigsy makes a face, unconvinced. “So you say.”

“You might surprise yourself,” Tripitaka goes on, recognising his reticence for what it is: self-doubt, and the unease that comes after centuries of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. “It can be scary, letting your fragile parts be seen. But it can be healing too.”

“Right.” He chuckles again, shockingly brittle. “The whole ‘misery loves company’ thing? Find some poor idiot who’s just as pathetic as you are? That sort of rubbish?”

He doesn’t mean that, she can tell, but still the insensitivity annoys her.

“Sharing your _experiences_ , Pigsy.” She keeps her voice even, swallowing down the urge to raise it in chastisement. “Knowing that you’re not the only one who struggles with your emotions. Knowing you’re not the only one who feels grief or sorrow or...” A beat as he huffs a breath, like he’s trying to laugh again but can’t quite manage it. “Whatever other feelings you might be struggling with.”

She knows exactly what feelings he’s struggling with, of course — he’s almost as unsubtle as Monkey in the way he wears his past deeds on his sleeve, a blazing beacon of shame and self-loathing — but the look on his face says it’s not something he wants to hear spoken aloud. Whether she agrees with that or not, she respects him too much to press him for it; the burden is his, not hers, to carry or release as he sees fit.

He says, uncharacteristically quiet, “Don’t know that I’d have much in common with a bunch of small, sad humans.”

He doesn’t mean it the way it sounds. She knows that; it’s the only reason she doesn’t smack him for it.

What he really means is _good people_ and _people who have earned the right to be sad_ and _people who have spent their lives fighting back against people like me_.

He probably also means, at least a little bit, _people who are better in their smallness and sadness than I’ll ever be in a million bloody years of god-life and eternity_.

Tripitaka, who has spent a great deal of time wearing the serene smile of a monk — a therapist, as her cynical, insensitive gods would say — and listening without judgement to every possible colour of human emotion, knows that he’s wrong about all of those things. Guilt is a powerful, and devastating thing, and it’s seldom more potent than when it takes root in the hearts of the undeserving.

Pigsy has earned his guilt; he deserves to feel its claws and he is right to let it bear down on him. 

But there are others — humans, yes, and perhaps gods too — who feel the same things, unearned and undeserved. Grieving mothers, daughters, widows, blaming themselves for deaths they could never have prevented. Survivors grappling with feelings of worthlessness, wondering why they were spared when more deserving souls weren’t.

They would take comfort, she knows, in seeing their guilt refracted through the lens of someone like Pigsy, someone who truly did wrong and knows how atonement should taste.

And not just them, her time in the village has taught her: Pigsy might find comfort too, in turning his guilt to selflessness and kindness rather than self-hatred and self-flagellation.

“I think,” she says, “you have more in common than you think. People come in all shapes and sizes, Pigsy, and with their own experiences. Sharing yours, even with ‘small sad humans’...” She doesn’t quite keep the disdain from touching her voice there, and she can’t bring herself to feel bad about it. “It might be more rewarding than you expect.”

It is her own experience speaking now, the memory of a grieving mother taking comfort not in the shapeless robes and hollow words of a monk but in sharing her experiences with a girl who has more than a few of her own, who has felt the same grief, the same loss, the same guilt, who _understands_.

The memory of a grieving girl, as well, sharing that understanding for the first time with someone who has been there too.

Frowning thoughtfully at his hands, his expression closed off and wholly unreadable, Pigsy murmurs, “Rewarding, you say?”

The word is shallow by design. It is so like him, Tripitaka thinks, to latch on to those base, surface things, to cling not to the idea of spiritual fulfilment but the promise of cheaper gratification even in an act of vulnerability and compassion. It is like him, yes, and it would be all too easy to look no further, to shake her head and throw up her hands and so miss the deeper sentiment hidden behind it, the subtle tremor he barely tries to hide.

 _Rewarding_ , he says, and it would be so easy to assume that’s really all he cares about. But Tripitaka has made herself a monk in spirit if not in body, and she has made an art out of listening closely to the words beyond the words, an art out of hearing the unspoken feelings behind the ones given their voice. She listens now, to _rewarding_ , and hears the hundred other words hidden underneath, not nearly so shallow after all.

She turns away from him, for his sake far more than for her own. She looks back over her shoulder instead, finds the darkening horizon where the little village still stands, wounded and bleeding but still holding on, still surviving. Who knows how many more raids those poor people will have to defend themselves against? Will the faith she sowed among them be enough to keep them strong next time? Will the time she spent there change any part of their fate?

She doesn’t know. She can’t know. She can only do for herself the same thing she tells them to do, when she smiles a monk’s smile and tugs on her monk’s prayer beads and takes their shaking hands.

 _Find faith_ , she tells them, and herself, _and hold it as close and as tight as you can_.

Behind her now, she hears Pigsy let out a breath. Shaky and shuddery, it’s a very different kind of shallow to the kind she heard before in his words.

“Maybe next time, eh?” he says, and this time it sounds nothing like the last time or the time before, this time it sounds like something entirely new.

Keeping her gaze fixed on the distant horizon, Tripitaka lets her smile soften into warmth. It’s not a monk’s smile, not the serenity of one whose job is to give succour or bolster faith, nor is it the smile of the chosen one, ‘Tripitaka’, the hope of humanity who cannot be seen to be anything less than perfect for anything more than a moment. It’s the same smile she shared, too briefly, with the grieving mother, a smile born out of recognition and understanding, of shared moments and shared experiences, of shared feelings, the good and the bad.

It is her smile, and hers alone, and when she turns back to let him see it, the radiance she finds in his face says that he knows exactly how much it means.

“Maybe next time,” she agrees, and sits back to watch the sun set.

**


	2. Wide-Eyed And Full

**

Pigsy isn’t really big on the whole redemption thing, to tell the truth.

Oh, he’ll make a show of it when pressed, of course; who wouldn’t? Living up to his potential, making amends for his bad judgement calls and bad decisions and general overarcing bad behaviour. Doing right by the people he would have cheerfully sold out for a sandwich not so very long ago, like a part of him doesn’t still grapple every minute with the notion that he might one day do the exact same thing all over again.

Discipline has never really been his strong point. Restraint, self-denial, control and centeredness and compassion, all that righteous do-gooder rubbish that comes so easily to decent, good-hearted folks like Tripitaka. Expecting the same from him is like expecting the clouds not to burst in the rainy season: nothing likely to come out of it but disappointment and the risk of getting soaked to the skin.

The thing is — and it’s kind of a big thing, for all that he’ll never, ever admit that part out loud — the thing is, he actually kind of liked it. The life before, that is, the one he’s supposed to feel bad about. He’s supposed to have regrets — real regrets, that is: shame, a healthy dollop of guilt and remorse, apology and sincerity and _I’ll never do it again, I swear!_ — but he’s not entirely sure he does. Maybe that’s just a moving-on, getting-better sort of thing, ‘compartmentalising all the hard stuff’ or some other nonsense; he’s reasonably sure that’s what Tripitaka would call it, at least.

If he ever told her.

Which, not going to happen. Pigsy may not care as much about his own reputation as he pretends, most days, but the little monk cares about hers a whole lot. What he is — what he _isn’t_ — reflects. He won’t put that on her.

A little bit of progress, maybe, that.

Not enough, to be sure. But a little.

To care enough about someone else’s feelings that he’ll keep his own tucked away and out of sight. It’s not much, but it’s also not something he’s ever really done before. Caring at all is still kind of a new thing, and caring that much is—

Honestly, it’s kind of scary.

This particular kind of caring, anyway. The kind that doesn’t end in trouble, the kind aimed at the right sort of people, the good sort.

The kind that keeps itself far away from demons and their twisted temptations.

Mostly.

He’s trying. He really is. It’s just hard to reconcile the part of him that wants to do right by the right people with the part of him that doesn’t feel nearly as remorseful as it should.

He’s supposed to want this stuff for its own sake. To be good because being good is good; the clue’s right there in the sodding name! It’s good to be good; isn’t that a no-brainer?

Should be, at least.

But maybe — and it’s something he’s thought about a lot since throwing in with Tripitaka and the rest, and it’s something he spent about five centuries trying not to think about at all — maybe he’s just _not_.

Good, that is.

Redeemable.

A halfway decent person, when all is said and done.

Maybe he really is what Locke and the others always said he was. Maybe he’s just lazy. Maybe he’s just selfish. Maybe he’s just greedy, gluttonous, a walking hunger pang without a thought for anyone or anything except filling his mouth and his stomach. Maybe he’s just too bloody tired to care.

He likes being comfortable. That’s not so terrible, is it?

He likes living in luxury. He likes being warm and cozy and safe. He likes taking it easy, he likes being cared for, looked after, and wanted.

And food, of course. He really, really, _really_ likes food.

And maybe he should be ashamed of that — the gluttony thing, as Monkey likes to call it, shaking his head and pretending he doesn’t take just as many extra portions of the evening meal himself — but he’s not. He’s really, really, _really_ not.

There’s not much in the way of comfort or warmth out in the back end of nowhere, but at least there’s always food. No shortage of that, no matter where they go or what trouble they get into; the one safe constant, food, and why should he be ashamed of holding onto a little joy in a bleak and joyless world?

Pigsy has always had a creative sort of mind, when it comes to finding a reason to keep going.

So, creative soul that he is, he creates.

Masterpieces, if he says so himself. Culinary works of art, lovingly crafted from whatever modest supplies they have and whatever offerings they can glean from the the fields and forests and farmlands they happen to pass through. Masterpieces, and yes, he’s proud of them, and yes, they bring him joy, and no, he’s not even the least little bit ashamed of that.

His friends have mixed reactions.

Tripitaka, as frugal as one would expect from a human wearing the robes and moral matter of a monk, chastens him for his decadent choices, and for the waste when he makes too much — like she doesn’t gobble up every scrap of leftovers over the next week anyway, redressed and rebranded as ‘recycling’ or some such blasphemy.

“We should eat sparingly,” she tells him. “We’re supposed to be setting an example, giving hope to people who have nothing. How do you think they feel, seeing us eat so well?”

Pigsy hasn’t really given that much thought. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

“Everyone knows gods have ten times the appetites of humans,” he points out, quick and easy, like he’s had it on his mind the whole time. “They’ll understand our needs are different to theirs. And besides, we need to keep our strength up for all that questing malarkey, don’t we?”

Stone-faced, Tripitaka echoes, “Malarkey.”

Pigsy shrugs. He could point out that, for all her complaining, the little human never shies away from taking a second portion of her particular favourites, or that he’s caught her gazing longingly at the cooking pot even when it’s not yet dinner-time. Bad form to accuse a holy name of sin, but if gluttony is really as bad as all that, maybe she’s got a ways to go in the ascension department as well.

Worse: if ‘eating sparingly’ is the thing they’re meant to strive for, then Sandy is a bloody saint.

The very picture of sparing, that one, at least when it comes to meals cooked over a proper fire.

Sandy, as weird in her eating habits as she is in everything else, is a proper little scavenger: she barely eats a mouthful when he’s spent half the night cooking, but she hoards and stockpiles rubbish from the forest floor like her life depends on it. She’ll fill her pockets with berries and nuts, fill her pouches with mushrooms when she can get them, fill every little hidey-hole about her person with this or that bit of forage or scrap — not all of it actually edible, despite his best efforts to save her from herself — but the one thing she doesn’t fill is her belly.

If Pigsy makes too much, as Tripitaka claims, it’s only because he’s cooking for four and feeding three.

“It’s good to be prepared,” Sandy says when he asks. “If we’re ever in a bad situation, you’ll thank me.”

Privately, Pigsy thinks they’ve been in plenty of bad situations since they started the quest, and never had the need for poorly-stored mushrooms or poisonous berries.

(Well, okay, fair point: one time the berries did come in handy. But the less said about that, the better.)

Besides, he kind of suspects the word ‘bad’ means something quite different to her than it does to him.

To him, ‘bad’ means getting his head chopped off, or falling off a mountain on one of the unpredictable days when Monkey’s cloud is being moody and petty and refuses to come to his rescue. To him, ‘bad’ means demon attacks and off-their-rocker scroll guardians, the kind of living threats that have made their lives difficult ever since the quest began.

He’s never known the agonies of a weeks-empty stomach, the cramping torment of feeling his insides start to devour themselves. He’s never been forced to survive on dirt and dreams for months at a time, he’s never had to choose between poison and something worse. He’s never stopped to wonder how it might feel to slowly starve to death.

Sandy doesn’t need to wonder. She knows, intimately.

So she hoards everything and eats almost nothing, and maybe there’s a little bit of remorse in him after all, because he leaves it at that and doesn’t ask her about it again.

Out of all of them, only Monkey is anything like him. Raised on Jade Mountain, centuries on centuries of abundance, he’s unashamed of anything, least of all his appetites.

Monkey appreciates good food nearly as much as Pigsy does. He’d never stoop so low as to praise or flatter him for his masterpieces, would never actually admit to taking pleasure in someone else’s work, but he eats like the kings he named himself after, and wears his enjoyment like a halo around him, a crown that’s a whole lot kinder than the real one stuck to his forehead.

“What’s the problem?” he says to Tripitaka, smirking through a mouthful of spiced salmon and sautéed potatoes. “It’s food time. Pigsy makes food, Monkey eats food.”

Simple enough, Pigsy thinks, but of course Tripitaka finds fault even with that. “We’re on a quest to save the world,” she snaps, “not to sample its culinary delights!”

Pigsy, who worked particularly hard on those potatoes, sighs and points out, “Nothing to say we can’t do both.”

“Right,” Monkey agrees, swallowing and immediately filling his mouth again. “We’re the good guys, monk, remember? You know, the _heroes_. We’re supposed to get the best.”

There’s a touch of something almost wistful in the way he says that, a sort of nostalgic yearning that Pigsy understands rather better than he’d care to admit. The food is good — of course it is, he made it — but it’s about the only good thing that’s come their way in weeks, and that kind of tiredness can weigh a soul right down.

Tripitaka can call the two of them spoiled and greedy if she likes, but there’s only so much misery that even a god can take before it all gets a bit much. Having something nice to look forward to at the end of the day... that kind of thing matters, it really does. Some days, it’s the only thing standing between optimism and full-on bloody despair.

He and Monkey get that. Live and breathe it, even, like a mantra keeping their spirits going. The other two — Tripitaka with her rustic, ‘sparing’ way of living, and Sandy who doesn’t trust anything that _isn’t_ full-on bloody despair — really don’t.

It says something, he supposes, that Tripitaka stops trying to argue with them after that.

Unfortunately, the look on her face, silently judgemental, says something else entirely.

*

He doesn’t care. This isn’t something he’s going to compromise on.

He’ll swallow his pride on a lot of things — following orders, even when they don’t make any kind of sense, or playing the strong-shouldered pack-mule day in and day out, or doing whatever other humiliating and degrading ‘jobs’ the others throw his way — but not that. If he’s going to stick out this quest and see it through to the end, he’s damn well going to do it on a full and happy stomach.

He’s still not completely sold on the whole ‘seeing it through’ part, if he’s honest, but that...

Well. That’s a conversation to be had with himself, in private, where no-one else can hear.

Old habits die hard; it’s not a nice thing to accept, but it’s true just the same. If keeping this one little vice is what it takes to stop him from giving in to other, more harmful ones, well, that’s a hit their resident sparsity-preaching monk is just going to have to take. For the team, and all that.

Right now, the team in question is in the middle of an enforced time-out, and Pigsy is secretly but desperately wishing he had one of those not-so-harmless vices to indulge in.

Because right now? Food is definitely not cutting it.

They’ve been camped in the same spot for two days, with a few more still ahead of them, and none of the others are in any condition to be eating at all. Sandy is out of commission entirely, sick with a raging fever after taking it upon herself to cleanse the nearby river of pollution, and Monkey — never one to be outdone by someone else on the scale of senseless self-sacrifice — is nursing a massive concussion after wreaking vengeance on the demons who polluted it.

Bad enough, the two idiots and their self-inflicted suffering, but Tripitaka has been so busy fretting over them that she’s practically forgotten to feed herself.

That leaves Pigsy the only one left with any kind of appetite at all, and honestly, by this point, he’s rather wishing he’d spent less time in the last village stocking up on cooking ingredients and more time stocking up on hard liquor.

It’s the middle of the night, still a few hours away from day three of the pity party, and he’s the only one awake.

Tripitaka is dozing fitfully, giving in to her exhaustion at last after watching over the others for two days straight; it’s not the most flattering look, slack-jawed overtiredness, but at least she’s getting some much-needed rest. Sandy is tossing and turning on her bedroll, drenched in sweat and shivering; she may or may not actually be sleeping, but she’s so deep in delirium at this point it doesn’t really make a difference.

Monkey probably shouldn’t be asleep at all, his battered brains being the way they are, but just try telling the Monkey King not to do anything, especially when it’s for his own good. Pigsy is more or less sure he’ll be fine — he heals quicker than the rest of them put together, and his skull is a pretty tough thing, delicate ego aside — but still he finds himself keeping a closer-than-usual eye on his breathing.

If anyone were to ask, he’d say that’s for Tripitaka’s sake, to spare the monk a little bit of her worrying while she catches up on her own needs. If it’s not exactly the truth, well, that’s between him and the trees.

He’s not standing guard, per se — on Monkey’s insistence, they don’t really do that — but his senses are keen enough that he doesn’t really need to; lazy or not, at the end of the day he’s still a god, and even lying flat on his back he’s perfectly attuned to the world around him. Anyone tries anything, no matter how subtle, he’ll pick up on it.

And the shadows prowling the outskirts of their camp?

Whoever they are, they’re not even trying to be subtle.

Pigsy isn’t the most patient god in the world, but even he knows a thing or two about the element of surprise. It’s pretty obvious that whoever’s skulking around believes the whole camp is asleep, so why would he strip them of that happy little illusion before they get close enough to give him a better look?

Bandits, he guesses, or possibly wandering opportunists seeking some easy money. If they had any idea that it’s the Monkey King whose coin-purse they’ve got their beady little eyes on, no doubt they’d turn around and run for their lives.

Lucky for them, the infamous betrayer-of-gods-turned-saviour-of-humanity is a ludicrously heavy sleeper. Even without a head injury, he’s been known to sleep through storms and screams alike, waking only when Pigsy whacks him with his rake or Sandy douses him with water. As he is now, injured and exhausted, he’s utterly dead to the world.

Pigsy takes no shame in admitting he’s tempted to let them get away with it. Rifle their way through his slumbering pockets, steal whatever he’s hiding about his person, serve him right for not listening when Tripitaka told him that he should stay awake until his head is better.

Tempting, to be sure, but maybe Pigsy has come a little further in his unwitting redemption arc than he thought he had, because it’s only a moment. A passing thought, a flicker of amusement, and then—

And then he’s on his feet, almost before he’s made the decision to move at all. Rake in one hand, the other resting on his hip, he clears his throat loudly enough to startle the two would-be pickpockets into freezing, panic-stricken, right where they stand.

He’s not sure what he expects to find in their faces when he leans in to get a look. Defiance, most likely, followed by the startled realisation that they’ve just walked into something way out of their league. The usual stuff, basically, typical of mindless thieves trying their luck in the dead of night.

That’s not what he finds at all.

What he does find is a pair of wide-eyed boys, neither one of them older than ten or eleven, already looking nervous even before they catch his face and realise what he is.

No bandits, these.

No opportunists either. No bounty hunters, no wandering demons, no—

Nothing like that. Just a couple of kids who should really be in bed.

Playing pranks, possibly? Causing trouble on a dare, the way kids do?

Out here, though, in the middle of nowhere...

Pigsy narrows his eyes. He lowers his rake, nice and slow, but doesn’t set it down just yet.

“Bit late for a stroll,” he croons, as cheerfully as he can manage, “wouldn’t you say, lads?”

The taller of the two boys — a lanky, fair-hared bit of a thing who is trying just a little bit too hard to look like he’s not scared out of his wits — squares his scrawny shoulders.

“What’s it to you?” he demands, in a voice still a fair few years from breaking.

His companion, shorter but just as skinny, doesn’t even try to hide his fear.

“We weren’t doing nothing!” he squeaks, high and horrified. “We was just—”

That’s as far as he gets before the other one silences him with an admittedly impressive glare. If he’s older, it’s not by very much; it must surely be the winning attitude that earned him his place as leader of their little two-man band.

“ _Nothing_ ,” he says again, turning the glare on Pigsy. “We wasn’t doing nothing, and it’s none of your business anyways.”

Pigsy actually laughs at that. For a couple of seconds, that is, before he remembers that he’s supposed to be the responsible guard-standing adult, giving these little troublemakers hell for trying to pickpocket gods and monks in the middle of the night. Tough as it is, being all that in the face of such endearing young scoundrels, still he forces himself to sober.

“Right.” He’s definitely not still smiling. Not even a little bit. “Might want to take a closer look at that bedroll you’re trying to thieve from, though. Because that snoring lump nestled all cozy-like in there? Kind of a big deal.”

To his credit, the lad does as he’s told, leaning in to get a better look at the slumbering Monkey King. Rather more to his credit, he only flinches a little bit as he moves. Making a good show of bravado for his friend, most likely, it’s only age and experience with exactly these kinds of shenanigans that allow Pigsy to see through the façade to the trembling limbs underneath: the kid’s terrified, but refusing to let it show.

The bluster lasts approximately two and a half seconds, about as much time as it takes for him to peel back Monkey’s blanket and catch sight of the glittering golden crown.

Pigsy doesn’t _quite_ manage to stifle his snicker as the kid lurches backwards, pale face blanching even paler in the moonlight, and splutters, terrified and awestruck in almost equal measure, “Is that...?”

“The very same,” Pigsy says, swallowing another laugh. “You, my naïve, optimistic little friends, were just about to pickpocket the Monkey King himself.”

The younger boy curses colourfully under his breath. “You’ve done it now,” he seethes at his friend.

Still, despite their panic, neither one of them seems to be in any particular hurry to flee the scene.

Pigsy takes advantage of that, using the faint moonlight and not-so-faint firelight to look more closely at the troublesome little pair: the older one blinking rapidly, unable to tear his eyes away from Monkey’s still-sleeping form, and the small one gawking at his friend, slack-jawed and sickened, like he really thinks Pigsy will turn around and smite them right then and there.

As if he would.

He might be a washed-up good-for-nothing, a piss-poor excuse for a god with a too-broad definition of ‘repentance’, but he’s not that far gone.

Never was. Not even—

He cuts off that train of thought as quick as he can. There’s no sense in dwelling on the past, not when he doesn’t feel as bad about it as he should.

None of that. Focus. 

The kids: scrawny little things, both of them, fearful and easily spooked. New at this sort of thing, probably, or else just really lousy at it; either way, if clumsily picking pockets in the dead of night in the back end of nowhere is how these lads get their feed, it bodes pretty poorly for putting any meat on their bones any time soon.

Orphans, maybe, or else their loving guardians have simply left the little ones to their own devices with nary a thought for their safety. Is there really much of a difference, Pigsy wonders idly, between dead parents and ones who just don’t care?

It’s not exactly his field of expertise. He’d have to ask one of the others.

Later, though; not now. Now, he looks at the boys, both scared to death but neither one of them trying to escape — not defiance, he guesses, but simply the lack of any other option — and makes a decision.

“Well?” he demands, as stern as he trusts himself to be without terrifying the poor lads more than they already are. “Sit yourselves down, then, if you’ve a mind to it.”

They gawk at him, the two of them together, like they think he’s lost his mind.

Fair enough, he supposes, and maybe they’re not altogether wrong. It’s not exactly the most conventional way of handling thieves in the night, inviting them to sit and sup. But then, when has Tripitaka’s little band of gods, misfits, and well-intentioned idiots ever been conventional?

After a long, awkward, frozen-in-place sort of pause, the younger of the boys nervously pipes up, “’Scuse me?”

Pigsy covers his amusement by waving a hand — expansive and rather unnecessary — at the fire. “Can’t very well send you back out there into the middle of nowhere this time of night, now, can I?” he points out. “Bloody irresponsible, that’d be.”

The boy’s mouth is hanging open. “But we were trying to—”

“Shh!” his friend hisses, elbowing him sharply in the ribs. Then, to Pigsy, with a sudden shyness that speaks a whole lot better of him than all his bravado and false attitude, “You mean it?”

“Sure, why not?”

Point made, he leaves it there and doesn’t try to push them further. He watches in smiling silence as they eyeball him and then each other, communicating in that efficient, wordless way of kids who know each other very well. A whole conversation between them, words and signals all come and gone in scarcely the blink of an eye; the miracle of youth, he thinks, and allows himself a moment of missing his own.

Whatever it is they say without saying, it seems to end in an agreement. A nod from the older, a loud, nervous gulp from the younger, and then they’re moving as a single unit, shuffling close to the fire to warm their hands.

They’re smart enough not to let their guards down completely, even after they sit themselves down and get comfy, but when Pigsy goes to work warming the leftovers in his beloved cooking pot the ravenous gleam in their eyes says a great deal more than they probably realise.

Orphans or not, it’s obvious these kids haven’t gotten a decent feed in way too long. And that pours a particular colour on their attempts to steal from the Monkey King in his sleep.

Definitely not a prank, then. Not a dare or a stupid joke or just good old-fashioned ‘kids being kids’ type behaviour. It’s hunger, that gleam, and a not-small measure of desperation too; brighter in the older one, like he feels the weight of responsibility, taking care of his friend. Whatever their story — and he’s not so deluded as to think they’ll give it up willingly — some things are just too obvious.

It’s the same stuff he sees in Sandy sometimes, when she refuses to eat the food she hoards for fear of needing it ‘later’. It’s the same stuff he sees in Tripitaka, too, when she returns from one of her little missionary trips to some poor town or village, tending to the sick and offering comfort and food to those in need. Its tragic, is what it is, and if he still had a heart it’d likely be in pieces.

He says, idly stirring the pot and watching their hungry eyes light up, “So, then, how long have you lads been making a living out of picking good folks’ pockets in the dead of night?”

No answer, save a brief exchange of glances. He’s not really surprised. He shrugs, lets them know there’s no risk of punishment here, and lets the food and the silence both simmer.

Finally, just as the smell of spices reaches its mouth-watering pinnacle, the older lad blurts out, not an answer but a question: “Why are you doing this?”

Pigsy heaves his big shoulders. “You woke me up,” he says, like it’s just that simple. “I’m hungry. And this stuff is too bloody good to be eaten alone.”

A fine excuse, he thinks, and one he plans on sticking to.

The boys, clever enough not to look too hard at a gesture of goodwill, don’t try to interrogate him any further. They keep their traps well and truly shut, and what meagre suspicions might still be rolling around in their young, overthinking little brains are pretty quick to melt away once he’s filled a couple of bowls and shoved them into their eager hands.

The sound of slurping and chewing is music to his ears.

Two long and frustrating days, he’s been stuck with companions who can’t or won’t eat. Two days of listening to Monkey’s moaning and Sandy’s groaning, two days of watching Tripitaka wringing her hands and sighing and brooding over two fully grown gods. Two days without so much as a word of appreciation for all the little things he’s been doing to keep their little ship running while their heavy-hitters are out of commission. They’d fall to bits and pieces without him, but just try making any one of those hard-headed buffoons see that.

The boys don’t thank him any more than he would have expected Monkey to, but their beaming faces and satisfied smiles speak much louder than any grudging ‘thank you’ ever could.

“You’re _welcome_ ,” he says, only pretending to be affronted.

More silence, then, until all three of them are patting full bellies and pushing away their empty bowls. The pot, still cheerfully simmering, is lighter than it has been for days, and Pigsy’s chest feels much the same way. There might be little he can do to speed up Monkey’s healing or help Sandy burn through the toxins and poisons she drew into herself from the river, but at least he can do something for another pair of troublemakers.

Sustenance: it’s all he’s got, really, his one and only talent. It’s been killing him, a whole lot more than he’d ever admit, that it’s been all but useless in easing his friends’ suffering.

All of that — the helplessness, the frustration, the regret — he keeps to himself. Wouldn’t want them to think he’s going soft, now, would he?

But still, as he wraps up a little bundle of leftovers for the boys to take with them, he’s not ashamed to admit that their tearful, earnest smiles warm his withering heart.

*

He gets maybe a minute of peace and quiet after they’re gone.

A minute, if even that much. He’s barely had time to even catch his breath when a smug, unwelcome voice pipes up, “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you give away food.”

Pigsy, gritting his teeth, doesn’t bother to turn around. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping off that pesky concussion of yours?”

Monkey huffs a laugh. “I did!” A rustle of fabric as he throws off his blankets, and then he’s right there, standing in front of him with arms folded and an insufferable smirk on his face. “And now I’m awake.”

“Hooray.”

Monkey, graciously ignoring the bite of sarcasm, sits himself down next to Pigsy and peers squintily into the cooking pot like he’s trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

“Well,” he says after a moment, like this was the whole purpose of his getting up all along, “since it’s apparently midnight snack time or something, might as well load me up too.”

And he grabs the nearest clean bowl and thrusts it under Pigsy’s nose.

Rude, yes, but given the circumstances Pigsy is rather inclined to let it slide. It’s the first time Monkey has shown any sign of appetite since he crawled back to camp two days ago with his head in his hands and his tail — blessedly metaphorically — between his legs.

It’s the first time, too, that he’s show any interest in holding a conversation, or doing anything other than sulking and scowling in his bedroll, cradling his head, and whining that they’re not back on the road again yet because he is, quote-unquote, ‘fine’.

On another day, Pigsy would surely have a thing or two to say about his rudeness here, the all-too-common presumption that he only exists only to serve Monkey’s whims. He cooks, he carries their things, he stands guard when instructed, whether or not it’s necessary or even makes sense; he does everything the great and powerful Monkey King doesn’t feel like doing for himself, and with nary a complaint. Monkey, far more than the others, is notorious for taking advantage, and on a good day Pigsy would definitely want to push back.

Might enjoy the inevitable argument, if he’s completely honest about it. He’s not really had much opportunity in his life for this kind of easy, mostly-harmless back-and-forth. Not in the old world, with armies of gods under his boots, and definitely not in the new one, under the heels of demons; he’ll never give Monkey the satisfaction of hearing it said out loud, of course, but there’s a a tiny little part of him that kind of appreciates having another soul to push back against without fear of repercussion.

It’s been a big part of his life, repercussion, for nearly as long as he can remember. The so-called ‘perks’ of being a natural follower, and a not-quite-so-natural leader.

He doesn’t have the heart to push back now, though. Wants to, maybe, to take a shot at reestablishing the status quo and all that easy back-to-normal stuff, but if he’s honest — secretly, privately, where even Monkey won’t ever know it — after two days of misery and self pity, he’s just so bloody relieved to see him back to some semblance of his old, obnoxious self, he just doesn’t have it in him to make a brawl out of this.

Next time, most definitely. But this time...

Well, even Monkey gets a pass once in a while, yeah?

Pigsy sighs, shrugs, and fills the great big oaf’s bowl.

“Feeling better, then?” he asks, handing it over and helping himself to yet another modest serving.

Monkey makes an irritable noise. “Been feeling fine for ages,” he breezes, for probably the hundredth time. “I’ve just been faking it so Sandy doesn’t get all embarrassed about making us stick around here while she gets over her thing. You know what she’s like when she thinks she’s being a bother or whatever.”

That’s a lie, if ever Pigsy heard one. Not the part about Sandy, that’s true enough, but the part where Monkey cares even the slightest bit about sparing her blushes. Still, there’s a sort of quiet softness in the way he’s glancing back at her bedroll, and Pigsy finds he doesn’t much have the stomach to call him up on it.

“Course you were,” he snorts, and lets drop.

Monkey, predictably if rather annoyingly, is not so generous.

“So,” he wheedles. “You giving away food?”

Pigsy rolls his eyes. “It does happen sometimes, you know.”

“Yeah, when the little monk orders you to.”

A growl catches in Pigsy’s throat. He wants to cut this whole conversation off before it gets started — _maybe you should spend less time thinking about what I do with my food and get to work eating yours, you concussed buffoon!_ — but there’s a strange earnestness hiding underneath Monkey’s wheedling that gives him a little pause.

For a start, Monkey’s actually looking at him. Properly paying attention, that is, not just casually trying to wind him up while he plays with his food; he’s genuinely curious, or at least making a show of pretending to be, though for the life of him Pigsy can’t begin to guess what’s got him so interested in his habits all of a sudden.

Needs a distraction, maybe? For all that he claims he’s been fine for ages, he’s still grimacing every time he shifts his head a little too far to the left, and there’s a familiar headachey queasiness on his face that suggests getting through his ‘midnight snack’, even with a renewed appetite, isn’t quite as comfortable or as easy as he’d hoped it would be.

Calling it bravado, then, Pigsy sighs and indulges him.

“Those kids were half-starved,” he says with a too-casual tilt of his shoulders. “And it’s not like we didn’t have enough to spare, is it? You three haven’t eaten more than a bite between you in two days, and there’s only so much I can get through all on my own.”

Monkey’s lips twitch, though whether that’s a response to the words or just discomfort, Pigsy has no idea. He forces down another sizeable spoonful, masking the effort by pretending to think, then fixes him with an assessing, almost-maybe-sober sort of look.

“So just that, then?” he presses as he swallows. “Didn’t want to see your precious leftovers going to waste?”

“Sure.” Pigsy musters a grin, careless and indifferent. It’s not much easier than watching Monkey struggle through his meal, not that he’ll let it show. “You didn’t think I was going soft or something, did you?”

“Hope not.”

He actually sounds like he means that. As much as Monkey ever really means anything, at least, which is still not all that much, but there in the dead of night, with nothing but rising steam and hot food to bridge the space between them, it feels a whole lot heavier than it likely is. Like he’s doing that thing the others sometimes do, saying one thing by saying something else entirely.

Pigsy ponders this for a beat, hiding behind his own bowl, his own spoon, his own faux-contemplation. Then, speaking slowly and carefully like he knows Tripitaka would if she were here instead, he says, “Didn’t know you cared.”

“I don’t!”

He coughs, then, too loud and much too quick to be believable, and glares into his bowl. He might not care about Pigsy himself, but he clearly cares a great deal about something.

Smothering his frown, Pigsy says, “I’ll try not to make it a habit.”

“Good,” Monkey says, then hastily clears his throat again. “I mean, uh... good. It’s bad enough we’ve got those two trying to be all kind and giving all the time, you know? You’re the only one I can trust to...” A long pause as he flounders — words aren’t Monkey’s strong point, even without a head injury muddling his thoughts — and then he finishes, rather lamely, “...to not do that.”

 _Ah-ha_.

This time, when Pigsy summons a grin, it doesn’t come hard at all. “You mean, you enjoy having someone around who’s as self-serving as you are.”

Monkey’s pout is... 

Well, it’s something, all right.

Pigsy softens, just a little.

“I wouldn’t put it like _that_ ,” Monkey is grumbling, looking not much more worldly than the two lads who just tried to pick his pockets. “But yeah, if you’re going to make a thing of it, I do. It’s _boring_ , all that do-gooder stuff Tripitaka makes us do. And it’s _exhausting_. Like, I’ve had this stupid headache for two stupid days now, and for what? Why is it so awful to want a reward once in a while when I’m putting my neck on the line every stupid day? Since when is that a bad thing?”

Pigsy pats his belly. “You’re asking the wrong god,” he says.

“No, I’m asking the right one.” Looking surprisingly serious now, Monkey sets his bowl to the side. It’s still close to halfway full, a sure sign that his head isn’t quite as close to ‘fine’ as he’d like them all to believe. “You and me, we’ve been there, right? Being loved and appreciated for being awesome and doing awesome stuff. Living well and eating well and being content. All this doing-good-stuff-just-to-be-good rubbish...” He makes a face. “It’s not like how it was.”

True, that, on a few levels. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard, letting go of the easy life he had with Locke, the one he’s supposed to regret.

It doesn’t come as comfortably as it once did, remembering ‘how it was’. Leading the armies of heaven then resting comfortably on his laurels among his fellow gods: the old world was generous to those who where generous to it in turn. Then, in the new one, resting on very different laurels with Locke and whatever other demons would take him in, making himself comfortable on a bed made of those same gods’ bones. Doing whatever it took to keep himself happy and full.

It’s a really addictive thing. 

Living well. Eating well. Being content.

It’s really, _really_ addictive.

They’ve been questing together for long enough now, him and Monkey, that it should be easier than it is. Both of them following in Tripitaka’s noble footsteps, helping to save the world, doing the right thing. Getting knocked about and battered by demons and whatever other monsters are skulking around on any given day, all in the name of right and good, and never once stopping to expect a reward or even a blasted ‘thank you’.

Monkey’s right. It pains him to admit it, because it always pains him to admit when Monkey’s right, but he is.

It’s boring.

And it is really, _really_ exhausting.

And he’s right, too, that Pigsy is the right god to ask about it, because he feels that every single day.

He’s not sure he wants to commit to a lifetime of this. Of doing good deeds solely for their own sake, not wanting or expecting to be rewarded or appreciated or thanked for what he does. Of eating sparsely when he could be eating comfortably, of living hard when he could be living well. Of being bloody miserable when he could be enjoying himself.

There are days, not infrequent, when he regrets leaving more than he would have regretted staying.

He’ll never tell them — not even Monkey, who apparently feels it too — but yeah, there are days.

Pigsy looks down at his bowl, empty now for the second — or possibly third — time, and admits, quiet but serious, “I feel like I should want it more, you know?”

The redemption thing, he means. Goodness for its own sake, selflessness. Being more like Tripitaka, the best god of them all, for all that she’s small and human.

He wants to want it, he really, truly does. But he wants to be comfortable more, and he doesn’t know if that’s something he really has a mind to break himself of.

When he lifts his head again, he finds Monkey watching him with relief on his face. Plain and obvious, he’s not even trying to pretend it’s anything other than what it is: _thank the heavens I’m not the only one_. Pigsy gets that too, the comfort of not being alone in his weakness and imperfection, the comfort in finding someone else who is flawed in the same places as he is.

Monkey jumps up to his feet, then immediately winces and touches his head.

“I’m glad we’re helping other people,” he says, looking like every syllable is leeching the life right out of him. “I mean, it’s good to be good, right?” He sighs, looking exactly as old and injured as he is; Pigsy, who has watched him strut and swagger for entirely too long now, knows how big a gesture it is, that he’s allowed to see it. “I just wish it wasn’t such a crime to help ourselves sometimes too.”

His voice kind of hitches a little at the end, there, like the dizziness he’s fighting comes from somewhere a little deeper than his bruised brains. Pigsy generously turns away, refocusing his attention on the discarded bowls, gathering them up and readying them for cleaning. That, at least, is a kind of generosity he can get behind: the kind that comes at no cost to himself, pretending not to notice the way the great sage equal of heaven is swaying and quietly recovering himself.

The cooking pot, still not as empty as he’d like even after being drained by so many hungry mouths, will take a full day’s worth of scrubbing at this rate. Pigsy glares at it, disgust and frustration and a little bit of helplessness.

“We’ll never get through all that,” he says to Monkey, and it’s not just a vent for his irritation. “You really think I would’ve given it away if we could?”

Even to two half-starved kids, he doesn’t add. And he hopes that Monkey won’t say it either, that he has enough compassion to spare him that, because it’s a little more true than he’d care to admit, and that is something he’s really, really not proud of.

Monkey’s grinning when he looks at him again. A proper grin, like hearing the words have washed away some of the discomfort and left him feeling more or less like himself again.

And maybe it did, at that, because there’s no strain in his voice any more, either, when he huffs yet another laugh and says, “At least I can count on you to keep us living well, huh?”

Pigsy’s not entirely sure that’s the best thing to be counted on for. He’s pretty well convinced he shouldn’t want to be that person any more, dependable not because of his strength or his power or his tactical mind, but because of his gluttony, counted on not to keep them alive but to keep them content.

It’s a sad, miserably world without a bit of contentment here and there, he knows that better than anyone, but is that all he really wants to be known for?

There are worse things, he supposes.

Tries to convince himself, at any rate.

Tripitaka, carrying the weight of the world on her delicate, fragile human shoulders, bearing the burden of other people’s pain and suffering as if it was her own. Noble, to be sure, but at what cost? Is he really supposed to want to be like that instead?

He doesn’t know.

What he does know, what he has to keep in the front of his mind, is what’s in front of him right now: Monkey, grinning earnestly and easily for the first time in two long, exhausting, miserable days. Beaming, sort of, like it really is enough to eat well and live well and be content.

There’s so little of that left these days, isn’t there?

Pigsy looks at Monkey, shakes his head, and finds a smile that only halfway fits his face.

“Yeah,” he says. “You can count on me, all right.”

**


	3. Keep The Home Fires Burning

**

Monkey doesn’t like to think about the old days.

The good days. The simple days, the easy days, the comfortable days. The days when his name was synonymous with ‘awesome’ and nothing else, when ‘great sage equal of heaven’ wasn’t just a nostalgic title he clung to out of desperation and shrinking hope but one he’d earned — really, actually earned — in the fires of battle, one he’d worn with hard-won pride.

Whether or not he’d convinced anyone else to actually use said title is another question entirely, and totally not relevant to anything at all.

There’s a lot of reasons to miss the old days, the world that was. The recognition, for a start. The applause, the accolades, the sort-of-acceptance. The comfort, most of all, and the luxuries that came with life on Jade Mountain. Being surrounded by his fellow gods, for all that they never gave him the credit his miraculous deeds deserved. Not having to watch his back for fear of demons or gossiping humans, not having to justify himself for the thousandth time to this cynic or that ‘historian’.

The world he woke up to was like all of his worst nightmares come to life, only worse even than that because it was all his stupid fault. Demons everywhere, his name and deeds all dragged through the mud, and the fate of the world resting on the head of some silly little human monk.

He’s gotten used to it now, and it’s at least fractionally more bearable. Time, experience, and familiarity have softened some of the sharp edges and he no longer feels his stomach clench to learn of this or that horror. The quest is far from over, but it’s been moving in a forward-ish sort of direction and it’s no longer a given that some random idiot will hear his name and spit at him.

Some still do. Others gasp and bow down and make offerings worthy of his title, like they used to do back in the old world.

Still others — his least favourites, in a whole bunch of different ways — only blink and raise their eyebrows and say, “Who?”

It’s confusing, this weird in-between thing he’s living now. This halfway-between-worse-and-better sort of place, this world that is improving on itself but still has so far to go to be anywhere near the one he knows. This don’t-know-where-to-look thing where half the people worship him, half hate him, and the other half have never heard his name before in their lives.

(That seems like maybe one or two more halves than a single thing should have. He’ll ask Tripitaka later.)

Point is, what in the seven hells is he supposed to do with all those mixed signals? One minute they’re showing him the devotion and reverence he deserves, the next they’re cursing his name and spitting on his boots, and two days later they don’t even know who he is!

It gives him a headache, trying to keep all that stuff straight in his head. Trying to remember whether they’re in a village where he should brag about his exploits to boost morale or whatever, or one where he should keep his mouth shut.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Tripitaka answers wearily, for the thousandth time. “The answer is _always_ ‘keep your mouth shut’.”

And that’s another confusing thing, another thing that’s new and strange: that she gives him orders and he sometimes listens.

Tripitaka is nice enough, by human standards. A good friend and a cherished companion — yeah, he’ll admit to that — she puts up with his big head better than most, for all that she likes to give him a hard time about it. He likes her a lot, and heeds her wisdom more than he’ll ever let her know. But for all her blessings and talents she’s still just a human, and he’s still a god with a memory long enough to yearn for a time when her kind were like ants skittering about thousands of leagues below him and his.

It’s been a tough change, coming to see humans as real actual people.

Pigsy does it well enough, most days, though Monkey’s not sure that’s the compliment it ought to be. After all, he also sees demons as real actual people, so who’s really got the right of it there? He’ll gladly shoot the breeze with anything that offers to feed him, good or evil or otherwise, and while it’s maybe a noble thing when it comes to humans and other little creatures, maybe it’s not so laudable with others.

Monkey didn’t really know him back in the old world, but it’s hard to imagine him being any other way than what he is now. Not so much ‘easy going’ as... well, _easy_. In the good ways and the bad.

Sandy, good and bad in very different ways, he tries not to think about. More, even, than he doesn’t like to think about the world that he lost — the world he had a hand, kind of, in destroying — he really doesn’t like to think about the way she sees this one, the one she was born to. Rather than simply accepting humans as the small-but-growing insects they are, she almost seems to think they’re _more_ than her; coming from a god, it’s kind of sickening, the way she worships some like Tripitaka and cowers from others like she’s the animal and they the deities.

Two extremes, his god companions, but both of them entirely too humble for his tastes.

Monkey has always been better, always been more. He’s not in any hurry to give that up.

But it hurts to think of what he’s lost, what he so carelessly threw away in pursuit of a crown and a title that ultimately meant nothing. Not just his status — real greatness, real power, a name that came from his deeds not some cheap golden trinket — or his place as one of the elite of Jade Mountain, but the other stuff as well.

The other _gods_.

Gods who thought and felt like he did, who loved themselves and didn’t see that as something to be ashamed of. Little baby gods, just coming into their powers, looking up at him like he was everything they wanted to be one day. 

Even the less fun ones had their moments once in a while. Gwen, all goody-goody self-righteousness but still not above cheating at cards, or Lior, who always took everything so seriously until you got a couple of beers into him.

And the Master...

Monkey really, really doesn’t want to think about him.

It’s been long enough; he knows he probably should.

But it hurts. It really, really hurts. Worse than the stupid crown sutra, worse than broken bones or shattered pride, worse than any kind of pain he’s ever known in his life. And Monkey may not be a coward, may not be the kind of god to shy away from a little pain when he could confront it and overpower it and come out stronger and better on the other side, but this is something he just _can’t_.

Maybe that does make him a coward.

Maybe it makes him weak like Sandy, scared of humans she could crush with a thought, or weak like Pigsy, who complains at the least little bit of strain or labour.

Maybe it makes him weak like Tripitaka, with her delicate, fluttering human heart, so fragile that it would stop beating entirely if it ever felt too much.

A scary thought, being that weak.

So he decides not to think at all.

*

It’s easy enough, most of the time.

His companions seldom have any interest in what he has to say, even when it’s actually worth hearing, and even when they do, the last thing they want to hear about is _that_.

Pigsy already lived through it; he knows as much as Monkey does about the world that was, plus five hundred years on top, living in the world that is. It’s no fun, Monkey thinks, trying to talk about his own experiences with Pigsy around, even if he had a mind to; every time he tries to stretch the truth about this or that battle — for storytelling purposes, of course, to make it more interesting for the new-world newbies — there’s the big lug, interjecting with a pointed cough and an even more pointed, “Well, _actually_...”

Frankly, if he can’t tell the difference between exaggeration and creative license, he doesn’t deserve to hear Monkey’s dramatic retellings anyway.

Sandy doesn’t know anything and believes everything, but for all her boundless curiosity in all other parts of her life this is one thing she doesn’t want to hear about at all. Her ‘no’ is a tentative, fragile thing, but one that holds power over even the Monkey King. And he gets why it makes her react like that, he really does: the impossibility of imagining his world when hers is so different, the pain of trying to picture an idyllic paradise when all she’s ever known is hell. The idea that there might have once been a time when a weird little infant-god would be welcomed, where she would be raised safe and looked after: taught, trained, tended, not hurt, hated, hunted.

A perfect world, but five hundred years beyond her reach.

Monkey can definitely see how it might tear her to pieces, to have to hear about that.

He keeps his mouth shut when she’s around, because contrary to popular opinion he’s not completely insensitive, and that? That, he gets.

Tripitaka, scholarly little know-it-all, is nearly as bad as Pigsy. For all that she’s tiny and human and mortal, she’s read nearly as many books as the Master, and boy does she enjoy reminding him of that. She thinks she knows everything because some old monk taught her his version of history. She thinks she knows everything just because she can read the ancient language and Monkey can’t, just because she wasted her formative years with her head in scrolls, reading and learning and studying and all that stupid pointless stuff, just because she did everything the Master used to—

 _Whatever_.

If she thinks she’s so smart, she can tell it. He’s not going to waste his breath.

Easy, then, not to talk about it with them. Most of the time they make it simple.

 _Most_ of the time.

Other times, though, when it’s not just his friends that he has to worry about...

Then...

 _Now_...

Not so much.

*

It’s a tiny little farming village, out of their way and a waste of their time.

Tripitaka is in one of her monastic moods, wanting to ‘do good’ and ‘be helpful’ or whatever it is monk-type people do when they should be taking it easy, while the rest of them stock up on supplies and catch their breath after a week of non-stop travelling. Fair enough, if that’s what she wants to do with her time; in a place like this, there’s no shortage of bored villagers who are all too eager to gather around and listen to her preaching.

It’s a bit weird, he thinks, the way she leans harder into the monk thing now they all know she’s not really one than she ever did when she was trying to convince them she was. But then, maybe that’s just a natural side-effect of the being-comfortable-in-her-own-skin thing, now that she’s claimed the title by choice and not necessity; humans go through identities like gods go through wine, he thinks sometimes, and doesn’t pontificate too hard over it.

Sandy, meanwhile, has wandered off somewhere, as she does, to be alone. Five minutes in this place was enough for her to get that glassy-eyed look on her face, breathing shallow, halfway to panic, the way she often gets when surrounded by people she doesn’t know. She likes to stay out of sight, even in little nowhere holes like this where no-one’s paying her any attention at all, much less baying for her blood like they do in other places.

Monkey doesn’t really get the whole shy-nervous-need-to-hide thing, but so long as it does no harm he doesn’t much care either. Let Sandy do what she likes, and if she’s out of his hair so much the better.

Pigsy, being his usual self, has plonked himself down at the bar of the local tavern — a run-down wreck of a building that barely deserves the name — and hasn’t moved since the moment they arrived.

Monkey is halfway tempted to join him there, if the truth be told, but he’s already restless and itching to actually do something; too much time in one place without moving has that effect on him, turning his whole body into a livewire of pent-up energy. Day-drinking has its upsides, for sure, especially when Tripitaka is too busy being a ‘monk’ to tell him to stop, but even more time sitting around won’t do any good for the itching in his legs and under his skin, and it won’t do a blasted thing for the need to be in motion.

He’s not entirely sure how he gets himself wrangled into helping one of the local farmers track down his runaway son, but he has a feeling it has something to do with the fact that he’s the only one around to hear the old man’s plight.

He’s so damn bored by that point, he doesn’t even have it in him to protest the baseness of the task.

A part of him wants to, just because he can — _don’t you know who I am?_ — but he swallows down the instinct because doing something is a whole lot more fun than doing nothing, even if the something in question is a few hundred leagues beneath him.

The story is exactly as simple as it sounds: rebellious, sullen teenager versus overprotective father. They had a big fight, so the father says, and now the kid hasn’t been seen in a couple of days. It doesn’t sound like a particularly big problem to Monkey, but the old guy is clearly worried enough about his spawn that he’s running around begging for help, so...

So up he goes, on his cloud, to scour the neighbouring fields, farms, and forests, without so much as two words about how the fellow should be thankful that he’s deigned to help him out. If Tripitaka were here to see it, he’s sure she’d be really proud.

He’ll have to tell her about it later, in grand, sweeping, dramatic detail. She’ll need it for her little chronicle, after all, to accurately represent his generosity and awesomeness.

The searching part is the less-fun part. He’s glad to have the wind in his face again and his cloud under his knees, glad to be back in motion, swirling and leaping and somersaulting through the skies, but he doesn’t particularly enjoy the alone-ness of the task, the way it forces him to think more than he wants to about what he’s looking for and what it means.

A stubborn, angry young man, lashing out at a well-meaning but pushy parental figure. He may be not super-clear on the specifics here, but he knows this story well enough already, doesn’t he?

It’s too familiar, too uncomfortable, and the sting on his face as he scans the yellowish fields below doesn’t come from the blistering speed or the lashing of the wind.

He hates this stupid story, he really does.

He’s been where this kid is. Older and wiser, maybe, with a thousand years and a few thousand victories under his belt, but when all is said and done, still not so far away as he might like. Maturity has a very different meaning to a god than it does to a baby-faced human, and it doesn’t follow the passage of time quite so neatly. A whole millenia behind him, and Monkey was far from the oldest god on Jade Mountain with a tendency to pouting and sulking and overselling himself.

The Master brought that kind of behaviour out in a lot of them. Unintentional, probably, but that’s what happens when high expectations meet oversized egos; he expected the best from each and every one of his students, and never settled for less than he knew they were capable of. A firm hand but never ruthless or cruel, it was entirely too easy for Monkey — fresh from his latest victory on the field of battle — to imagine himself the best, to look down at texts and scrolls and think of them as unworthy of his time.

Even now, he has a hard time admitting he might have been wrong.

When he sees Tripitaka poring over some weathered old tome or ancient scroll or whatever else, when her face lights up with a scholar’s excitement over some fresh piece of history...

It’s not that he cares about any of that book-learning stuff, and it’s not like he even really needs to know the ancient language anyway, what with two fluent gods and a tiny genius human always around to read it for him. He’s not the scholarly type, and he’s pretty well fine with that.

He doesn’t think about all the studies he should have taken more seriously. He doesn’t regret shirking his education, not even for a second. He just regrets disappointing the Master.

Human youngsters like this teenage nobody he’s chasing? They have no idea how much of a gift it is, to have fathers and teachers who love them enough that they’ll push them and protect them, parents and mentors who see the potential for good in them — not just the shallow, self-worship stuff that means more to young egotists than it should, but the deeper, truer spark, the personal one that actually means something — and strive with everything they have to bring it out and make it shine.

Monkey learned too late, what a precious gift it was to be taken under the Master’s wing. So much more than the rise of demons, so much more than the fall of gods, that is the one horror he’ll never be able to shake.

He doesn’t want to think about it. He works really hard not to think about it, and most of the time he’s pretty damn successful. But here and now, tracking down some spoiled little runaway who doesn’t understand or appreciate the worried father waiting back at home, who doesn’t understand how lucky he is to have a parent who _cares_...

It’s really, really hard not to want to take that boy, when he finds him, and smack some sense into him.

He knows that’s probably not fair. He’s only heard the father’s side of the story; maybe the kid has a thousand good reasons to want to run away from home. Didn’t he think he had at least that many himself, the day he tried to leave Jade Mountain? And even if he doesn’t, even if he really is just a stupid, stubborn little know-nothing brat, as wrong now as Monkey was back then, is he really in any position to judge anyone for not being able to see their blessings?

He was a thousand years old before he learned that lesson. This kid is... what, sixteen?

Even Sandy is older than that.

Hell, even _Tripitaka_ is older than that, and she’s basically his benchmark for small, undeveloped humans.

He can’t expect someone so young and mortal to grasp something it took him a thousand years and then another five hundred in a rock to wrap his own head around. No-one can expect that, not from someone whose worldly experience is limited to a farm and a couple of fields.

So why is he still so angry?

*

It takes him just under an hour to find the sneaky little brat, and even then it’s more by luck than skill.

He’s hiding out in some decrepit old barn not too far from the village, a skeletal, falling-apart revenant of a farmstead that’s been dead probably as long as the Master. Ransacked by demons, or else simply left to rot when the neighbouring ones fared better, who can say? More, who really cares?

Either way, the place is a wreck. Filled with stinky old straw, dried mud and very little else, it does make a pretty decent hiding place for a runaway: sheltered from the elements, dark and musty and easily missed. It’s only by sheer stubborn thoroughness that Monkey thought to check it out himself.

And yep, that’s him all right: a perfect mirror of his father, gleaming black hair and gleaming black eyes, he almost seems to vanish in the shadowy dark.

 _Almost_.

But Monkey has always been good at spotting things others might miss, and it’s with a smug sort of grin that he hollers into the seeming-nothing, “Feel like coming out to say hi?”

Smart enough to recognise that it’s not the cheerful invitation it’s pretending to be, his sneaky young charge creeps half an inch out from his shadows and retorts, “Not really, no.”

Monkey snickers, then sobers. He’s not here to make friends or play nice, pretending he’s an equal to this barely-out-of-infancy little human; he’s a thousand-year-old god, and he’s here to return the brooding whelp to his father.

“It’s cute,” he quips, baring his teeth, “that you think it was a suggestion.”

That does it: with a sigh and a grumble — kids will be kids, after all — the teenager hauls himself all the way out into the light, blinking up at him with the irritable sullenness typical of his kind.

There’s not much light to speak of, only a few wan shafts of sun dripping down through the cracks in the rafters, but it’s enough to get them both on equal ground, face to face like actual people readying to have a proper conversation. The teen is still glowering and sulking, but at least he’s doing it where Monkey can see him.

“S’pose my pa sent you?”

It’s telling that this is his first assumption. Telling, as well, that he’s rolling his eyes and sneering at the idea, that he’s annoyed and pouting, not defensive or frightened or upset. He’s a brat, sullen and petulant, but there’s a shade of arrogance underpinning his words that Monkey knows all too well, and it sets what few doubts he had swiftly at ease.

He doesn’t answer the question.

“Why did you run away?” he asks instead, trying to emulate the sharp-low tone Tripitaka uses sometimes when she talks to idiots who don’t deserve her patience.

(Himself, usually, and sometimes Pigsy.)

“None of your business,” the kid mutters.

Monkey rolls his eyes. If this idiot child wants to play that particular game, he’s in for a sorry surprise; Monkey has never yet met anyone, human or otherwise, he couldn’t out-sulk when he sets his mind to it.

“Looks like I’m making it my business,” he says, as cool as anything. “You want to talk it out, or should I just pick you up and drag you home like a lost sheep?”

The kid looks him up and down, like he’s giving serious thought to accepting that challenge. He narrows his eyes for a moment, then frowns, and then they widen to saucers, mouth dropping open with that deliciously familiar shock-horror-awe-disbelief that makes Monkey’s day every single time.

“Hold up. Are you—”

“The one and only.”

He never lets them finish that question. It’s much more fun this way.

The kid is gawking at him, slack-jawed and stupid. “Are you _really_?”

“See for yourself.”

And he taps a finger to the gleaming band of gold crossing his brow.

He’s not always been this comfortable, showing off the crown. When he first found out what the thing could do — what Tripitaka could do with it — he would have given anything to be able to tear the thing off his head, bury it in the middle of nowhere, and never have to lay eyes on it again. He still does want that most days, but he’s come to accept that he’s stuck with it, just like he’s stuck with Tripitaka, Sandy, and Pigsy.

He doesn’t like what it does. He _really_ doesn’t like that it binds him to a human master. But it’s a part of him, and it’s the part that a lot of the people who bow down at his name seem to recognise first, so he’s kind of come to accept it a little bit. Like a sort of calling card, maybe, or a flashier way of doffing his hat and saying ‘how do you do?’.

It works well enough here, at least. The kid stares at him for a couple more seconds, shakes his head like he’s trying to wake himself from a dream, then finally snaps his mouth shut.

“Whoa,” he whispers, tremulous and suddenly respectful. “That’s...”

“Pretty awesome, right?” Monkey preens. “I know, I know. I get that a lot.” He lets that sink in for a beat or two, basking in the adulation, then shakes himself back to the topic at hand: “But hey! Doesn’t that say something about how badly you’ve worried your old man, that he’d send the great and powerful Monkey King all this way just to find you?”

That actually sounded pretty mature and responsible, he thinks proudly. Another point for Monkey!

He doesn’t blame the kid for being a little unnerved by hearing it put that way. Who wouldn’t be nervous on finding out that they’re so important the Monkey King himself would take time out from his schedule to track him down, just as a favour to his anxious father?

If he behaves himself, maybe he’ll take him for a spin on the cloud.

The last thing he expects, when the shock and disbelief wears off, is for the kid to go back to his scowling sullen broodiness.

“Tell him I’m not going back,” he says, voice suddenly tight again.

Monkey quirks a brow, disappointed that his sales pitch fell so flat.

“Come on, kid,” he wheedles, applying pressure but not force: careful like Tripitaka would be, but also pointed like Pigsy. “The old geezer’s worried sick about you. That has to count for something, right?”

Another scowl. Then, much more quietly, “Couldn’t be bothered to come searching himself, though, could he?”

A fair point. But not really _fair_ -fair.

“Lot of ground for those old legs to cover,” Monkey points out, trying to smile without smirking too hard. “Humans are weak like that, you know? They get old, suddenly all their parts don’t work so well.”

And demons too, he guesses, at least if Davari’s shaky six-hundred-year-old appearance at the Jade Mountain was anything to go by. Monkey has never seen a god that frail, at least not without some major intervention.

Like sucking the poison out of a fragile, dying human, for example.

Unbidden, Monkey finds himself thinking of Gwen, her body dissolving to spirit and dust as she fled the mortal realm, accepting her own death so that Tripitaka might not be consigned to hers. He remembers feeling regretful, ashamed, remembers the acid taste of her apology at the back of his mouth, bitter and cold. Remembers, most of all, wondering if that was the end, a severing of the last tie he has to the world that was.

Would he ever see another god who had known the Master, he wondered then. Was he watching the life bleed out of the last remaining soul who could remember his lessons, his brilliance, his courage?

No, he wasn’t. He knows that now.

But that doesn’t stop the memory from having teeth.

In spite of himself, in spite of the distance between then and now, he shivers.

The boy, almost forgotten, sees this and raises a brow.

“Don’t tell me the great Monkey King gets cold?” he quips, lips hitching in a ‘gotcha’ sort of smirk.

A moment ago, Monkey might have risen to the bait; now, suddenly sober, he simply ignores him. 

“Why are you so determined not to go back?” he asks instead. “Your father seemed decent enough.”

“ _Decent_.” He spits the word like it’s something toxic, a sour taste on his tongue made to burn. “I guess. Only he never _listens_.” Less bitter now, that one is a small, sad whine. “He wants me to be like him. Tend the farm, learn how to do all the stupid stuff he does, like it even matters. He doesn’t listen when I say that’s not for me. That I don’t want to waste my whole life on some stupid farm just because he did it. That maybe I wanna do something better. You know?”

Monkey does know. He knows it well.

So well that it makes him shiver again.

The anger rises again, unbidden and unbearable. All of a sudden he wants to take this sulking, moody little upstart by the neck, drag him back to his father’s farm and force the two of them to sit down and talk through their issues like grown-ups, like sensible people, like _gods_.

Stupid, senseless stuff like this can kill a good relationship. He knows this too: it cost him the most important one he’s ever had. It cost him the Master, the only one in the world who truly believed in him, and there’s nothing even the Monkey King can do to bring him back.

And these two idiots, this boy and his father, they’re only human. Their whole lives, they won’t have a tenth, or even a thousandth of the years Monkey had with the Master, much less the years he’s lived out since. A shudder, a twitch, blink of their eyes; a split-second, if even that much, and they’ll both be dead.

Don’t they see how precious their stupid little relationships are?

He clenches his jaw, swallows raggedly, tries to stop shivering.

“Believe it or not,” he hears himself mutter, “I know how you feel.”

The kid laughs. Bitter and brittle, it’s the laugh of someone who desperately wants to believe what he’s hearing but can’t fathom such a thing being true.

“Yeah, right,” he says, and the hitch in his voice is brittle too.

“Yeah, _right_ ,” Monkey affirms, deadly serious now. “Like no-one cares how you feel or what you want, or even who you really are. Like they all expect you to be some weird-wrong-stupid you-clone that they made up in their heads. Like they keep expecting this weird bizarro version of you that doesn’t exist, and everything the real you does is just...” He swallows. “Like you’re just one disappointment after another, so who even cares. Right?”

The boy is staring at him. His mouth is a thin line, but Monkey’s keen vision can see the tremors between his lips, the shaky foundations of his bravado when he mutters, “Whatever.”

Monkey, taking that as a win, presses on.

“But you gotta believe me on this one, kid,” he says, feeling it right down to his bones. “Running away from home isn’t going to make it better. You can’t change your father’s mind if you won’t even talk to him, and he can’t get better at hearing you out if you don’t give him the chance. You slink away now, all you’ll get is lonely and lost and a head full of stupid regrets.”

That’s a lot more than he intended to say.

It’s a lot more than he’s ever said before, to anyone.

He wants to take it all back. He wants to—

But he can’t. He knows that, even without looking into the kid’s eyes and seeing the flash of hope.

That’s the thing about words. He’s learned this countless times before: from Tripitaka, with her books and her histories and her endless preaching about good and right, and from Sandy, with the way she spills out in her pain in poetry and prose, and from Pigsy, with his wheedling and needling and all the subtle ways he hides his cleverness behind sassy turns of phrase.

The thing about words, he has learned again and again and again, is that they’re always followed by more.

You can’t take them back once they’re out, can’t draw a line under them just because you’ve said the ones you want. You can try but it’s no good: once they’re out, they’re not really yours any more and you can’t—

You can’t just say one thing and then move on. They won’t let you, the words, and the idiots hearing them.

There’s always more. There’s always some smart comment, some stupid counterpoint, some difficult question. There’s always someone looking up, all stubborn and defiant and trembling lips, saying—

“You’re the Monkey King! What would _you_ know about being lonely and lost?”

And now he’s stuck having to answer that.

He doesn’t want to. He wants to be the immature manchild Tripitaka is always saying he is, the sulky misery-guts that Pigsy calls him sometimes after they’ve been bickering. He wants to throw the kid’s earlier ‘none of your business’ back in his stupid face and kick dirt onto his boots just because he can. He wants, most of all, to turn around and storm out of this stupid place and never, ever, ever look back.

He wants to—

He says, “Pull up a seat, kid, and let me tell you a story.”

*

It’s the most time he’s ever spent talking about it.

He doesn’t exactly pour his heart out or anything — he’s really not that type, and even if he was he knows better than to expect a sulking human teenager to sit through all that emotional drivel for more than a few seconds at a time — but it’s as close as he’s ever come to really letting out the darker parts of his life and his memories.

Not the rebellious, overpowered god who always imagined himself superior to his teachers and peers, but the (slightly) more humble one he became later, guided by Tripitaka, grounded by Sandy, goaded by Pigsy: a god forged not in power and triumph, but in grief and regret.

Monkey has never been the most mature god in the world, even he is willing to admit that. He’s never seen much point to it before, straightening his spine and acting his age; why waste time being all self-righteous and old-before-his-time when he could be having fun? 

But sitting here with this angry, stubborn human boy, trying to make him see the difference between sullen resentment and real, worthwhile hatred — “Just because you’re mad at him right now, that doesn’t mean you hate him, it doesn’t mean you want him to suffer, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t regret it with every breath in your fragile little human body if he wasn’t around any more!” — talking and spilling his guts and letting out all that guilt and grief...

Suddenly, for the first time in a millennium and a half, he feels _old_.

And, well, he is. Next to the kid, he’s ancient.

But until now, he’d never really felt it before.

Never really felt that line between age and understanding, age and wisdom, age and learning,

The kid looks up at him like he’s earned every one of those thousand and five hundred years.

It’s humbling.

It’s not a good feeling, he thinks, but maybe it’s an important one.

He thinks—

He does, yes. He _thinks_ , he lets that happen, and he lets it hurt too.

He takes the kid home, a couple of hours later, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t need to tell him to sit down with his father and talk things through with him — he trusts that he’s broken through to him enough that he’ll do that on his own, that he understands now why it’s important to at least try before throwing a tantrum and storming out — but he says it anyway, grinning and whacking him on the back, letting him see, as much as a human can really see anything that comes from a god, that he really does get it.

That he, young and human and insignificant, has the Monkey King on his side.

With any luck, that will give him the courage to open up and try to communicate. Really communicate, to speak his mind and give his father the chance to hear him out and understand, to stand up for the version of himself he wants to be, while still holding close the love he has for a parent whose only real crime was wanting something different for him.

They will talk. They will communicate. Hopefully they’ll reconnect. Whether that will change things between them or not, Monkey doesn’t know. 

But the relief on the old man’s face when his son shuffles in through the door gives him a kind of hope he hasn’t felt in close to five hundred years.

*

The others notice, of course, that something has shifted in him.

They don’t know what — at least, he really hopes they don’t — but he’s never been particularly subtle about the things he lets show and the things he doesn’t. Little pieces of himself that he’d kept locked up and closed off are creaking open now, exposing themselves bit by bit like the cracked rafters in the old barn, just enough to let the sunshine in, little flecks of yellow and white to banish the shadows he hadn’t even realised were there.

It’s Tripitaka, of course, who phrases it best. She smiles up at him, a beacon of warmth as they set off on their quest once more, and says, simple but effective, “You seem lighter.”

A lovely way of phrasing it, Monkey thinks. And a lovely moment, too, for about three seconds.

Of course, then Pigsy hears it, and of course he immediately shatters the moment, as predictable in his bluntness as Tripitaka is in her poetry.

“You mean less obnoxious,” he teases, though Monkey notes he’s smiling a little bit too.

Tripitaka laughs. “Potayto, potahto.”

“I’m wounded!” Monkey cries, clutching his chest. “ _Wounded_!” 

He’s not really, of course; he’d be rather more worried, in truth, if they _weren’t_ giving him a hard time.

“You will be,” Pigsy shoots back. “If you don’t put a sock in it.”

Monkey snorts, makes a rude gesture that earns him a _tsk_ from Tripitaka, then turns to where Sandy is bringing up the rear.

“What about you?” he accuses, because that heavy quiet of hers usually heralds something. “Feel like taking a shot too?”

Sandy, frowning at him with her head cocked to one side, says, “No.”

And that one little word, spoken very softly, makes his heart stop.

Because that one little word, and the sober look on her face, says a _lot_.

And just like that, he knows.

He doesn’t need to ask — he’s smart enough for that — but he does anyway, dragging her off to the side at the first opportunity he gets, not even bothering to try and be subtle.

“You were _there_ ,” he hisses, with rather more venom than he intended. “Weren’t you?”

Unaffected by the bite in his voice, Sandy only shrugs. “You know I like to hide in dark places,” she says, following his cue and refusing to feign stupidity.

Monkey bites down on a snarl. “You sneaky little...”

“You’re the one who didn’t bother to make sure you were alone.” Her smile is faint, but teasing; it doesn’t really lessen the blow. “Very sloppy, Monkey.”

Chewing on his tongue, Monkey says, “So you heard...?”

Sandy studies him for a beat, giving the question its due weight, then answers, quiet and maddeningly elusive, “You tell a good story.”

So saying, she drifts back into her trademark silence, stepping back emotionally and giving him room to process his responses: the brief flash of anger at having been overheard, the embarrassment at not having thought to make sure he wouldn’t be — because, sure, okay, she might have a point about that — and then the unwelcome rush of self-consciousness, the flush of shame and hurt. Giving him room, too, to figure out what to do with this new, no-less-unwelcome information, if he even wants to do anything with it at all.

He’s not sure he does.

Part of him wants to make her pledge to keep her mouth shut. Keep it hidden from the others, the brief moment of compassion and feeling too much, the moment that made him so proud of himself at the time. They would be proud too — Tripitaka, certainly, probably even Pigsy too, as much as he’d couch it in teasing — but Monkey’s not sure he wants to share that particular, uniquely personal kind of pride with anyone, least of all a pair of well-meaning but ignorant souls who will likely never understand what it feels like.

He doesn’t really relish the idea of sharing it with Sandy either, to be honest, but apparently that ship has already sailed. And in any case, she’s looking at him like—

He’s not sure. But he knows that he hates it.

It’s unsettling, for one: she’s staring, wide-eyed and unblinking, like maybe she’s not looking _at_ him, so much as _into_ him. Like she can hear all that stupid stuff he’s thinking, like she knows, not just because she heard it all but because she really, honestly knows.

He hates it a lot. He hates it because it’s weird and unsettling, because _she’s_ weird and unsettling, and he hates it because it exposes him and leaves him feeling stupid. He hates it a lot... but a part of him maybe doesn’t hate it as much as he thinks he expects to.

Because right there next to that weird-creepy-unsettling look, right there beneath the exposing and the feeling-stupid, right there behind all of that is the knowing. And with that, maybe a kind of understanding. Not the Tripitaka kind of understanding, all empathy and compassion and ‘good job, Monkey’, or the Pigsy kind, feigned shallowness and male bonding, but like something uniquely Sandy, like she’s not seeing _him_ at all but some broken-off little piece of herself.

He thinks he should hate that too, just as much as the other stuff. But maybe he doesn’t.

He says, because he can’t think of anything else to touch on all that, “I’m surprised you stuck around to hear it. You usually hate it when I talk about...”

Barely perceptible, she flinches. It’s enough to shut his mouth, enough to make him fall back a couple of paces until she’s pulled herself together again.

They don’t really talk about this. Honestly, between the two of them, they don’t really talk about much of anything at all. But the old world, his fond and not-so-fond memories, and her quiet ‘no’ every time it comes up... that’s something maybe they should have talked about. Because the way she’s looking at him now — not unnerving or weird, not any more, she just looks pulled apart and cut all the way open — reaches right into his chest and squeezes.

After a long, painful beat, she says, barely above a whisper, “It was a _good_ story.”

It’s a very different word to the one she said before.

 _Good_. Not like fun, not like entertaining or enjoyable the way a story should be. Not the easy kind of good, the kind that Monkey likes best, but the other kind, the uncomfortable-but-way-more-important kind, the kind that Tripitaka talks about all the time, on and on until he’s just about ready to scream from boredom.

 _Good_ , not like a good story but like a good deed.

 _Good_ , maybe a little bit like a good person too.

“Oh,” he breathes, feeling humbled all over again.

Sandy nods, swallows once, then rushes on like she’s scrambling to get the words out before she can change her mind and stop herself, like she has to get them out fast or it’ll hurt too much to get them out at all.

“It’s...” She swallows again, harder, and Monkey’s throat constricts a little too, in sort-of empathy. “It’s a story I know quite well.”

Now it’s Monkey’s turn to swallow, and to wince. He thinks he knows what she’s getting at — as clumsy as she is when it comes to talking, it’s not exactly super-clear, but he knows she’s trying and so he tries too — but he presses anyway, very carefully: “Yeah?”

“Yes. Um.” Her breathing is shallow, sort of ragged, the way it gets sometimes when she’s overwhelmed in a village full of suspicious strangers. “To be left alone for want of a father’s love. To miss it, to want it, to yearn for it. Even knowing that it never...” She sighs. “It’s not the _same_ story. But it’s one I know.”

The old hurt reignites in Monkey’s chest, a desperate sort of pain he hasn’t let himself feel this deeply for more years than he can count. It’s a bad pain, yes, but there’s a kind of healing in seeing it burn just as bright in someone else as well.

It’s different, like she says: Sandy yearns for the love of a father who hated her, while Monkey yearns for a second chance with the mentor he let down, the one whose love he only truly understood after it was ripped away from him.

It’s different, like she says. But it’s also a story they both know, and that...

That means something.

Unthinking, he reaches for her shoulder. She tenses for a beat or two, then nods and relaxes, letting him grip the sharp bone, squeezing in rhythm with his slowing pulse.

“Hopefully it’ll end better for him,” Monkey says, thinking of that angry human teenager and his fretting, equally human father, of a relationship not yet beyond saving, not yet beyond keeping alive, “than it did for you and me.”

Sandy smiles. Properly, this time, neither faint nor teasing; there is genuine warmth there, of a kind that her frozen wasteland of a body is rarely able to hold. Monkey knows exactly how much of a gift it is, and he accepts it with a smile of his own.

“I think it will,” she says, and he can tell that she really does.

She looks lighter too, he realises now. Like maybe she got as much out of hearing his story as he got out of telling it. 

It makes him wonder, a little bit in spite of himself, if maybe Tripitaka has a point after all when she spends all that time tending to the needy and the lost. Makes him wonder, looking at Sandy and her rare-but-dazzling warmth, if thinking and talking about the stuff that hurts is something worth doing after all, for others as much as for himself, and for himself as much as for others.

He gives Sandy’s shoulder a last lingering squeeze, then slowly, grudgingly lets go.

“If you liked that one,” he says, smirking now, “you should hear about the time I...”

Sandy groans. “ _No_ , Monkey.”

But she’s laughing a little as she says it, high and earnest and real, and it’s so easy to let go and join her, to shake his head and roll his eyes and really feel that warmth blooming in his chest, and he thinks that maybe that’s the better answer, at least for right now.

“Some other time?” he offers, grinning big.

She swats his arm, still laughing, and shakes her head.

But this time, he notes, she doesn’t say ‘no’.

**


	4. Falls To Climb

**

Sandy forgets herself sometimes, and she laughs, and she almost feels safe.

She forgets that these two things — laughter and safety — cannot exist in the same place. She forgets that there is danger in being heard, in being seen, in being known; she forgets that it is dangerous to be so exposed and so vulnerable in open spaces, to let her guard down for the second or two it takes to catch her breath, the lifetime or two it takes her to remember.

She forgets...

They are so good, her friends, at making her forget the monster she was.

The monster she—

No.

They tell her she’s not. They say that she never was.

They don’t let her get away with calling herself that.

Even Monkey, who has always looked at her with disdain and mild disgust, bears down on her in the moments when she wraps those words around herself. He grinds his teeth when she does it, and he flares his nostrils and he glares — not the kind of glare he gives proper demons, the kind he only ever gives the gentler creatures who aren’t dangerous at all — and he says, “Say that again and I’ll punch you into the middle of next week.”

By his standards, that’s practically an offer of protection. Not from the demons out there in the world, but from the worse ones inside her head, the ones with teeth and claws and blood on their hands. The ones that scream even without mouths, the ones that Monkey sees and probably understands better than either of them are comfortable with. He quiets them by force, not by gentleness, and she marvels every time because she never expects it to work as well as it does.

Tripitaka isn’t like Monkey. She doesn’t use force; she uses gentleness. She uses her hands, grounding her with the kind of touches that once — not so very long ago — would have made Sandy freeze up and panic. She uses her voice, careful whispers and slow breathing, reassurances meant for her and no-one else. She tells her she that is valued, that she is loved, that she is good; she tells her, again and again and again, that she is not a demon, not a monster, not a nightmare.

Sandy doesn’t believe her.

But she wants to, and she thinks that’s further than she’s ever got before.

Pigsy uses neither gentleness nor force. He uses the only tool he ever truly mastered: selfishness.

“Do you _have_ to say that?” he moans, blanching sort of greyish green, and she can tell he’s not really thinking about her demons at all, only his own. He’s not seeing the horrible things she sees in her own reflection, not trying to balm her, only himself, to soothe his own darkness, his own cruelty, his own monstrosity. He’s not saying _you shouldn’t see yourself that way_ , he’s asking _if you’re a monster, then what the bloody hell am I?_

Sandy could offer a few different answers to that, but she has a feeling he wouldn’t thank her for sharing them.

She keeps them to herself, then, just like she keeps to herself the days when Tripitaka’s gentleness and Monkey’s force aren’t enough to pull her out of the dark-cold-demon-shaped places, the days when even their warmth and their love aren’t enough to make her into something good.

She keeps a lot of things to herself.

She’d keep far more, if they let her.

But they don’t. They are better friends than she deserves, and like a puppy chewing on something it shouldn’t they don’t let her swallow the things that would make her sick. They don’t let her choke on half-truths and untruths, they don’t let her use the only name that ever fitted on her tongue. They don’t let her tear herself to pieces; instead, they hold her together, with gentleness and with force and with warmth and with love, with their hands and their voices and their smiles, and it is so much sometimes she doesn’t think she can endure it.

She so often thinks that, though. But it’s never yet proven to be true.

She can endure so much. If her life has taught her anything it is that.

She says the words out loud — their words, their truth, not hers — as often as she can. She says it to the suspicious souls who still won’t believe it, to every stranger they pass, every watchman who bars their entrance to this village or that town, to the children who stare up at her in slack-jawed fear and the ones who hide behind their mothers. Again and again, she speaks that strange-tasting truth — _I’m not a demon, I’m a god_ — but she seldom believes it any more than they do.

Tripitaka says it’ll take time. Monkey grins and reminds her that she has plenty of it. Pigsy doesn’t say anything, but Sandy suspects he’s thinking of his own lost time, centuries wasted in the company of real demons, real monsters. He should know better than the rest of them all put together, the differences between a demon and a god, but he’s the only one who won’t talk about it at all.

She holds the word _god_ under her tongue, bitter and sweet all at once, like medicine; she holds it there, keeps it safe for when she needs it. On the good days, the easy-to-remember-things days, that lone precious syllable sustains her completely, body and spirit and mind. On the bad days, the forgets-her-own-name days, one glance from a stranger is enough to undo every step forward she has ever taken in her life.

There have been a lot of strangers lately, and a lot of bad days.

She swallows them down, one by one, and keeps them to herself.

*

It’s hard to tell sometimes, whether the danger is real or all in her head.

Hard to tell whether it’s just another bad day — the whispering voices, the paranoia, the can’t-think-can’t-move paralysis — or whether her instincts are actually on to something.

Like now, for example.

She senses it everywhere, threat and danger and violence, the clogged streets closing in on her and making her throat burn. She feels it like a noose, tightening and tightening until she can’t breathe, until she doesn’t even need to wait for the drop, she’s practically dying anyway. She feels it, and it feels real, but is it really? Is it actually there, the threat that claws at her skin, the teeth-marks burying themselves inside her head, or is it just one more of those all-in-her-mind things the others would chide her for?

She gets her answer soon enough.

There aren’t many proper big cities left in the world, and the few that still remain have a cold and ominous aura about them. The air is too warm, choked with smoke and daylight-darkness; the streets are cramped and tight, dark alleys full of shadows but never empty, never quiet. Not good for hiding, impossible to disappear in a place as full as this; there are too many people, and they swarm the street, hungry to devour things smaller and weaker than they are, hungry to devour anything, everything, every _one_...

Sandy hopes it’s all in her head, the glitter in their eyes, the cracking of their knuckles. She hopes she’s imagining the bloodlust and violence shuddering through their bodies, ravening and rabid and—

She’s not.

The truth makes itself known in bold, black print: a poster pinned to the window of the tavern. The paper is already yellowing, but the ink remains clear. Its message, standing out starkly against the fading parchment, is indelible, impossible to ignore or avoid or escape.

_Reward for any brave soul who can slay the monster in our midst!_

Sandy knows what ‘monster’ means in the language of humans.

She tears the poster down before the others can see it. Crumples it up into a ball then hastily shoves it in her pocket. It digs into her hip through the holes in her clothes, sharp-edged and pointed; it may be out of sight, but it’s certainly not out of mind.

There is another poster on the door of a nearby house. A third, tattered and blackened with smoke, hangs over a blacksmith’s forge. There are half a dozen of them on this street alone; who knows how many they’ll find on the next?

She says to the others, in a low voice, “Whatever supplies you need here, I suggest you get them quickly.”

Tripitaka raises a brow. She’s confused, possibly a little worried. Both good signs: it means she hasn’t yet seen the posters, hasn’t divined the darkness pervading this place, hasn’t figured out what it means. If she can, Sandy would like to keep it that way; Tripitaka has already seen much more darkness than a human her age should. If she can protect her from this, a kind of horror that she herself knows too well, so much the better.

“I didn’t realise we were in a hurry,” Tripitaka says with a frown.

“We’re not,” Pigsy grumps. “Sandy’s just being her usual weird self.”

Thus decided, he throws open the tavern door and stomps inside.

Tripitaka peers at Sandy, head cocked just a little, like she’s trying to figure her out. “Are you—”

“Yes.” She casts a quick glance down the street. The rustling of paper is like a klaxon in her head, the low thrum of human voices a warning and a threat. “Get what you need. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Outside the city bounds, she doesn’t add, but she trusts Tripitaka to pick up the message even so.

She does; she always does. The frown doesn’t disappear completely, but the smile she summons is enough to cushion it somewhat; soft and sweet, it carries only the faintest note of sadness, the empathy and compassion like a drop of honey to soothe Sandy’s serrated edges. She looks at her like that so often, like she’s something jagged that needs sanding down, and it’s only when she reaches out and squeezes her hand that Sandy realises — gratefully — how completely she’s misunderstood.

An easy mistake to make, she supposes. She is so often overwhelmed in places like this; why wouldn’t Tripitaka assume the same is true here? Why would anyone assume something insidious unless they had no choice, unless they’d lived through enough horrors to recognise the prints of its fingers and its boots, the deep marks of its teeth?

She is thankful for Tripitaka’s innocence. And a small, demon-shaped part of her envies it as well.

“Okay,” Tripitaka says, and her voice is as soft-sweet-sad as her smile. “Wait for us outside, then.”

Sandy doesn’t trust herself to speak. Easier, she thinks, to let her silence speak for itself, to let her discomfort convince her friends of what they already assume to be true.

She’s so accustomed to letting people see what they want to see when they look at her, she almost forgets there are other alternatives.

She waits until Tripitaka lets go of her hand. She tries not to think about the cold space her touches leave behind. She closes her eyes, draws in a deep breath, and turns around, readying herself to—

Stops, suspended, as Monkey catches her by the arm, holding her in place.

His eyes, fixed not on her face but on her pocket, are gleaming darkly.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he hisses, too low for Tripitaka to overhear.

Sandy doesn’t insult his intelligence by feigning ignorance. “I won’t.”

He looks her up and down, as though trying to gauge how far to believe her. She tracks the line of his gaze, from her pocket to her face, then across the street to the nearest of the posters still on display. He’s smarter than he pretends to be, Monkey, and much quicker than the rest of them give him credit for.

Smart enough not to say the words out loud, even though he could.

What he does say, still low but carrying real power, is, “You’re a god.”

“I know,” Sandy says, though they both know it’s very seldom true.

He leans in close, whispers, “They can only hurt you if you let them.”

Well-meaning as they are, the words make Sandy want to laugh. Not the high, happy, forgetting-herself sort laugh, the kind that he and Tripitaka drag out of her sometimes against her will, the kind that only happens when she almost lets herself feel safe. Not that kind of laughter, but the other kind: the bad-day kind, the bad-head-space kind, the kind of laughter that tears itself like a scream from her throat, the kind that comes only when there’s nothing else left.

She doesn’t laugh. Not that kind, nor any other.

She smiles instead, soft and sweet, looking at Monkey the way Tripitaka looks at her, and carefully hands him her scythe.

“I know,” she says again, in a very different tone.

Then she spins on her heel, squares her shoulders, and turns to mist, vanishing into nothing so she won’t have to see the look on his face.

*

She knows what she’s looking for: that gives her an advantage over almost everyone else in the city.

They’re looking for a demon, a monster, a nightmare thing made out of cruelty and spite and hatred.

She is looking for wide eyes, jutting bones, torn clothes.

The kind of demons that humans seek in the dark are never truly demons at all. Sandy would know; she was one.

Some days, when they stop to rest in the middle-of-nowhere villages full of ignorant, frightened people, she still is.

Sandy knows two things about this monster, without ever having laid eyes on it:

She knows that it is almost certainly not a demon, and she knows that the humans of this place will not rest until they have found it, chased it down, and hurled its lifeless body to the ground.

She knows two more things as well:

She knows that this creature, this not-a-demon not-a-monster will be terrified, and she knows that it will draw its very last breath wondering what in the world it did wrong.

She knows—

No.

She cannot allow herself to know anything more than that. Not if she wants to sustain her strength long enough to find it. Not if she wants to sustain her _sanity_ —

She doesn’t need to breathe when her body is like this, but a part of her wishes she did; the rhythmic in-and-out would help a lot right now. The memories are lodged in her non-corporeal throat, visceral and heavy; they make her feel like she’s choking, heaving, seizing, make her feel like she’s dying, like she’s the one being pursued, like even the intangible wisps of her mist-form aren’t enough to keep her safe.

 _They’re not searching for you,_ she reminds herself.

She reminds herself too, of Monkey’s words.

 _You’re a god: they can only hurt you if you let them_.

And she won’t.

Never, ever again.

Never, _ever_ —

She keeps moving.

*

She finds it—

No.

She finds _her_ , cowering, terrified, in a lightless alley.

She finds her: wide eyes, jutting bones, torn clothes.

She finds her, and she knows.

Wide eyes. Pale and blue-grey, a cracked, imperfect mirror of her own. Milky and clouded in this dark place, the first swirls of madness and confusion taking shape behind them.

Jutting bones. Days without food, without touch, without love.

Torn clothes. Rags, barely held together by scrabbling, dirt-stained fingers. Battered by the elements, by bricks and stones, slashed by the dull edges of a knife or the ribbed knuckles of a fist.

She makes herself solid again, and her body falls to its knees.

The girl is older than she was, but not by much. There is a purity in those mist-coloured eyes, at least in the few little corners that haven’t yet been tainted by the cold and the dark. There is growth still to come for those long limbs, those skinny shoulders, those delicate hands. There is _life_ , a whole galaxy of it, all stretched out in front of her, and she should not be here, she should not be scared and starved and sick, she should not be shivering and shuddering, should not be forced into hiding, should not be doing all she can to make herself small.

She should not be looking up now, all tears and tremors, and wondering, “Am I really a monster?”

Sandy knows that her anger would terrify her. She holds it down, holds it back, and tries to smile.

“No,” she says, “you’re not a monster.”

The girl whispers, no less frightened, “Are _you_ a monster?”

Sandy’s chest tightens. “Sometimes.”

The girl studies her for a long, nervous beat. Silent, thoughtful. Still afraid, but it’s shifting now into something different. It’s not the kind of fear Sandy would expect of a hunted child, trapped in a dark alley with a—

Well. With her.

A gentler fear, she thinks. The kind that recognises its own.

Finally, softly, the girl says, “You don’t look like a monster.”

Sandy chokes down a sob. “Most people would disagree.”

“I don’t like most people.”

The sob turns to laughter in her chest. Not the good, forgetting herself kind of laughter, but the bad kind, the worst kind. It bursts out of her like desperation, like a spasm, like the awful delirium that comes after being in so much pain for so long there’s nothing left to do but give in and cry- _laugh_ -cry.

“I don’t like them either,” she says, when she trusts herself to speak.

The girl inches back, no doubt startled by the high, half-mad gurgle.

“They want to hurt me,” she whispers, shudderingly confessional, like she’s still trying to figure out whether or not she deserves it. “Do you want to hurt me too?”

“No.”

It is the easiest word in the world, but the effort of getting that one small syllable past her clogged throat makes Sandy shake almost as violently as her young companion. The pain in her chest is unbearable now, ribs squeezing her lungs and her heart, her whole body shuddering with the effort of not crying, of not screaming, of not becoming something worse than a demon, something worse than a monster, something worse than—

She can’t breathe.

Her vision is blurred and stinging with salt. Her head is full of water and mist and memories. Her hands are shaking and her legs are as useless as vapour.

She can’t _breathe_.

She wants to ask why. She wants to demand a reason for all of this — _you must have done something,_ she wants to scream, _that they would want you dead!_ — but she knows there is none. There was no reason all those years ago when she was the child cowering in an alley, and she knows, even without hearing this poor girl’s story, that there is no reason now either.

This girl has done nothing; she can see that in her eyes. They want her dead simply because of what she is. Perhaps she stole from somebody she shouldn’t have, perhaps her powers flared up in the wrong moment and were seen, perhaps she knocked someone down while fleeing from someone else. Perhaps she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She exists: that is why.

She says to the girl, through clenched, chattering teeth, “Do you know how to keep yourself hidden?”

The girl blinks, clearly failing to understand the question. She looks around herself, at the shadows of the alley, stretching out into the street beyond. She reaches out with tentative, trembling fingertips, touches the nearest wall like it’s something strange and unfamiliar, then frowns confusedly at her hand when it comes away wet.

“Isn’t this hidden?” she asks.

Sandy bites her tongue, forces back a sigh. “Only until someone finds you.”

The girl still doesn’t understand. “You found me.”

“But I don’t want to do you harm,” Sandy points out, as patiently as she can. “What do you suppose would have happened if I did?”

She gestures, taking in the closed space, the murk, the gloom. Darkness, yes, and shadows, but nothing else. Closed walls boxing them in from three directions, too high to scale without a cloud like Monkey’s; the only escape route is out into the street, and that’s no escape at all. No grates, no grilles, no gaps or holes in the wall, nowhere to run or hide once those precious shadows are pierced. If she was discovered, she would be cornered.

That can be useful, under the right circumstances. With water at her fingertips and a weapon in her hand, Sandy can turn a trap back on her hunters and make it their grave. But this child has neither water nor weapon, and she certainly has no experience; she can’t yet depend on her own talents to save her, and she certainly can’t depend on others to show mercy and spare her.

One day, perhaps, she will be able to back herself into a corner like this by choice, and use the closed space as a weapon in itself. But she is not there yet.

Sandy learned that lesson too, when she was even younger than this girl. She learned not to let herself be cornered, learned not to be seduced by shadows that housed a secret trap. She learned, first and fastest, the importance of always being able to see another way out.

No: of always being able to see _three_ other ways out.

Understanding at last, the girl’s shoulders slump. “I suppose you’d kill me.”

The emptiness in her voice, Sandy knows intimately.

She holds out a hand, lets the girl see how hard it’s shaking. Lets her see, too, that it’s empty, that the only weapon she has is sheathed safely at her hip.

“I can help you,” she says, trying to sound soft, trying to sound sweet, trying to sound like anything but what she is. “Teach you how to hide. Show you how to catch food without getting caught yourself. Help you to survive, if you like.”

 _If you like_.

She means, _if you can find a reason to want to._

She means, _I know how hard that can be._

She means, _I’ve been here too, I’ve been you._

The girl is staring at her hand, transfixed.

“Why?” she asks, and she means, _why would you want to help me,_ and she means, _why should I want to survive,_ and she means _why do I deserve help_.

Sandy smiles tearfully, and answers all three.

“Because,” she says, “you’re not a monster.”

*

The girl may not be a monster, but there are still others who are.

Not demons; that would be too simple. Demons don’t cower and hide in the shadows, no matter what the humans may think; why would they, when their kind already rule the world? Demons don’t need to steal to survive, don’t need to scavenge or else starve; they simply take what they want by force or by coercion, or by whatever other means give them the most pleasure.

Demons, real demons, have no fear, and thus no reasons to hide.

The creatures the humans call ‘monster’? They never, ever were.

The _humans_...

Here, there be monsters.

If given the choice — as if such a thing would ever be in her hands — Sandy would face demons over humans every time. A thousand-strong demon army, slavering and ravening with weapons and powers in hand, or a mob of humans armed with anger and fear? She would fight the former without fear, and flee from the latter without hesitation.

Indeed, she has done both. Many, many times, she has done both.

Demons are cruel and violent by nature; it is as much a part of who they are as it is part of who Sandy is to hear the water whispering its secrets, or a part of who Pigsy is to call down the lightning and summon his rake from a distance, or a part of who Monkey is to fight with the strength of twenty lesser gods. The world must be kept in balance, Tripitaka says; demons and their evil are just the natural counterpoint to gods and their good.

Humans are neither demons nor gods, neither good or evil.

When humans are cruel or violent or monstrous, it’s not by nature but by choice. 

Worse, they seldom see themselves as any of those things.

Humans abandon their own children in the middle of nowhere, and claim it was fear that made them do it.

Humans would hunt down the helpless and the innocent simply because they are different; humans would destroy the softest and gentlest creature in the most fragile moments of life just because it carries a power they do not understand.

Sandy has fought countless demons, and she has suffered for it. Demons are dangerous, terrible creatures; she knows first-hand that this is true. But nothing she has ever suffered at the hands of a demon will ever come close to the worse things she’s suffered at the hands of angry, frightened, desperate humans.

She knows their kind. She knows their motivations. She knows—

She knows that the humans of this town will stop at nothing to see this so-called monster destroyed, never stopping to think that by the same act they will be making themselves into something far worse.

Would it give them pause, she wonders, if they realised that their monstrous prey was only a child?

She wants to believe that it would. She really, really wants to find the kind of faith that Tripitaka talks about, tender-hearted and smiling softly, radiant in how deeply she loves and believes in her fellow humans. 

But Sandy is not Tripitaka, and she does not have her faith. Experience has taught her better than that, and she is so tired of trying to believe in things that don’t exist.

She offers, in a moment of sorrow and anger, to take the girl away from this place, this nightmarish city that would slaughter her in a heartbeat and not waste so much as a tear in mourning.

The girl refuses.

“My family is here,” she explains, with the sad simplicity of one who cannot imagine any other path for herself.

Sandy doesn’t understand.

“They don’t care for you,” she says, because she has been this girl, because she has lived this life, because no family who cares even the slightest little bit would allow their child to suffer this way.

The girl stares at her. Sorrow, Sandy thinks, but not for herself.

“I know they don’t,” she says in a whisper. “But I still care for them.”

This, soft and thick with feeling, from the mouth of a monster.

It’s not the words themselves that make Sandy want to cry, but the tenderness, the heartfelt, earnest _truth_. This child would risk her safety, her comfort, even her life, to stay here, to keep close to a family that discarded her the moment things became difficult. She would remain here, in a place full of people who would kill her for daring to breathe in daylight, because in spite of all that hatred all she feels is love.

It hurts. It hurts so much.

Sandy doesn’t remember very much about herself at that age. She remembers being cold all the time, remembers being in constant pain, remembers stomach cramps and confusion and the ever-flowing comfort of water close at hand. She remembers walking for hours, for days, for weeks, not knowing where she was going or why. She remembers, more vividly than anything else, thinking _I can’t go home, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t_.

Would she have tried to stay, she wonders, if she could? 

If her father hadn’t taken her so far away, if he hadn’t said those horrible words — _for the sake of your family_ — and made her swear to never ever, ever return.

Would she have stayed, if she’d been given the chance?

She doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know, either, whether she admires the girl for her devotion, for being so generous with her heart to those who would gladly discard it, or pities her.

She knows this:

That she will protect this child with everything she has.

Every breath, every drop of water, every drop of blood.

She will make sure those humans never, ever harm her.

Even if—

Even if.

She takes the girl by the hands, gentle but with urgency, and says, “I want you to stay hidden tonight. Practice the things I’ve taught you. Keep to the shadows, stay underground if you can, and don’t let anyone see you. Do you understand?”

The girl nods, then shakes her head. “Why?”

Sandy doesn’t answer. She turns, instead, and casts her gaze out at the busy streets. Approximately half the passers-by are harmless, if that many; the rest are armed to the teeth, hungry for nightfall and their next shot at the promised reward: _slay the monster, win a prize!_

They won’t stop until they find what they’re looking for, whether or not it ever existed in the first place. They won’t rest until their hated demon-monster is dead.

Sandy keeps her eyes on the street, on the passers-by, on their clenched fists. “Just stay hidden.”

“I will,” the girl promises, though Sandy can tell she still doesn’t understand. “Will I ever see you again?”

Sandy doesn’t look at her. Can’t look at her; if she does, she will never find the strength to leave.

She forces a smile the girl will never see, and says, with every ounce of truth she has, “I certainly hope so.”

*

Nightfall brings the gleam of moonlight off metal and the promise of blood.

It is very difficult for a mob to find a demon, even under cover of darkness.

It is not difficult at all, no matter the time of day, for a demon to find a mob.

Their hunger screams; their bloodlust sings.

Sandy wonders how long this witch-hunt has been going on. How many days — weeks? — have they been prowling the streets by night, searching for a monster that never existed?

She never though to ask; perhaps she didn’t want to know. Either way, it doesn’t really matter; it takes so little to churn up humans’ blood into frenzy, so little to make them ravenous.

She gives them every possible advantage: open space, the damning, dazzling spotlight of the moon, and her back against the wall. She exposes herself, then corners herself, makes herself vulnerable and makes herself harmless; she does all the hard work for them, stopping short only of impaling herself on their blades. She serves herself up like a sacrifice to the faceless masses, unarmed and easy prey, with nothing to mark her as a monster except the glint of madness in her eyes.

They have swords, daggers, pitchforks, torches belching flames.

She has a small sheathed knife and Monkey’s words in her head:

 _They can only hurt you if you let them_.

And she does.

She says, in a voice as strong and solid as steel, “If you want a demon so badly, take me.”

It is the first time in many, many years—

It is the first time in her life, perhaps, that she has accepted that name by her own choice.

Not since she heard it fall from her father’s tongue, acid-coated and bitter, not since she was too young to understand the difference, too young to see the darkness in his eyes for what it really was. The words she has held so hard under her tongue from the moment she was old enough to speak them — _I’m not a demon, I’m a god_ — dissolve now, crushed under the weight of the other ones, the truth that was always theirs and never hers.

She claims it now for herself, unwavering and unafraid.

 _I will be your demon,_ she tells them, her pale skin and pale eyes throwing the moonlight back in their faces. _I will be your monster. Slay me if you must, and take your reward, then go back to your homes and leave her alone_.

It is a bargain they don’t even know they’re making, but they accept it just the same, without regret and without thought. A demon is a demon, after all; who can say for certain that this isn’t the one they’ve been hunting?

A lifetime of experience has made her a very convincing monster.

She convinces them all, and none more than herself, all without raising a hand, without raising a weapon, without even raising her voice. She convinces them all with only the madness in her eyes, the rattle in her throat, the bleached-bones whiteness of her hair and the unearthly pallour of her skin.

She doesn’t fight them. She doesn’t want to; she never did.

They want a demon, they want a monster, they want a body.

She gives them all three of those things, oh so very easily.

A lifetime of experience has made her a very convincing monster, a very convincing demon. It has, on occasion, given her reason to make a very convincing body.

Sometimes playing dead is the only way to stay alive.

It takes so very little to convince them of their own strength, their own power. A hoard of humans is still so little next to a creature like her, but they want so badly to believe that they can overcome the thing that frightens and angers them; they want so badly to believe themselves more powerful than the monsters and demons that howl in the night.

She gives them that.

Their anger is sharper than their swords and their knives; it burns hotter than their firelight and their torches.

She lets it take her.

She lets them get a good look at her: the monster, the demon, the evil thing that deserves this pain.

She lets them—

She stands still and silent with her back to the wall and her hands empty at her sides, and lets them.

*

They dump her body outside the city gate, and there her friends find her.

Just as she knew they would.

Just as she _trusted_ , just as she _believed_ , just as she had _faith_ —

A strange sensation, to suddenly feel those things so strongly.

Tripitaka says, angry and horrified at the same time, “Sandy.”

Monkey, understanding so much more than he’ll let on, says, “Don’t, monk.”

Pigsy turns away, ashen-faced, wringing his hands, and says nothing.

Sandy says, more to herself than to any of them, “I was a very good demon.”

Then she closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again for a long time.

*

It is morning, the city is at least a dozen leagues behind them, and she hurts all over.

Tripitaka kneels beside her, pressing a cold, damp cloth to the gash on her temple.

“What were you thinking?” she demands, voice gentle but eyes as hard as diamond.

It’s a heavy question, loaded with anger and tenderness and countless other things, and it weighs more than Sandy’s tired, battered body can take. It settles over her, pinning her down and circling like a shark in her throbbing head, all sharp teeth and sharper memories; it makes the pain worse, but it also makes it better, to know the answer and know that it is good.

If it were anyone else, she would keep it to herself. 

Monkey wouldn’t need to ask, and Pigsy hasn’t yet earned the right to see these parts of her; nobody else would even be allowed to get the question out before she bared her teeth and turned them away, a growl-rough warning catching in her throat. But Tripitaka has always been special, has always been her own set of rules; she could ask Sandy anything at all, _anything_ , and she would answer.

She will answer.

She just needs to think about it for a while first.

She just needs—

She closes her eyes, breathes slow. Focuses on the pain pulsing through her body, dried blood and blooming bruises. Focuses, when she’s borne all she can take, on the cool brush of the cloth against her forehead, the rhythm of motion, the tender intimacy of the gesture, the rare-but-beautiful moments when Tripitaka’s skin makes contact with her own.

She says, a truth but not an answer, “I don’t want you to have to understand these things, Tripitaka.”

Tripitaka’s hand stills. The cloth grows uncomfortably warm, sticky against her brow, and then it disappears.

“I want to understand them,” Tripitaka says, rough with passion. “I want to understand _you_ , Sandy. I want to understand _why_...”

Sandy thought it was obvious. She thinks it’s a lovely thing that Tripitaka is not yet so corrupted that she knows without having to ask.

“They wanted a demon,” she says softly. “I gave them one.”

It is half the answer. The other half, she will keep to herself.

Even from Tripitaka.

Tripitaka, whom she knows would understand. If she shared the deeper truth — _there was a girl, there was a child, there was a small little thing who could have been me_ — she knows that Tripitaka would have her ‘why’ in full. But she, Sandy, could not bear to see the look on her face, the realisation, the horror, the cloying compassion.

She couldn’t bear to be transformed in her eyes.

Tripitaka knows more about her than anyone ever has before. She knows where she comes from, she knows how she lived. But there is a difference between understanding that such a thing might have happened once and learning — inescapably, unavoidably — that it is happening still. That in spite of their work, their quest, their everything, still there are children being discarded by their parents, still there are small, frightened gods being called monsters and demons and nightmares.

She could not bear for Tripitaka to hear those things, swallow them down, and then look up and see their reflection, still so raw, in her friend’s eyes.

She opens them, finds Tripitaka gazing down at her with softness and sorrow. Even with those truths hidden, her empathy is like a thumb digging into a bruise. Her fingertips, damp with water from the cloth, delicate and careful and so painful, ghost across her hairline.

“You’re not,” she says, for the hundredth, the thousandth time. “You’re not a demon, Sandy. You were never a demon and you will never be a demon.”

Sandy shakes her head, lets the dull burst of pain ground her.

“I was,” she says. “Last night, I was.”

 _Because I chose to be,_ she does not say, will not say, cannot say.

But she did. And that matters.

It matters that she suffered by choice and not by force. It matters that she let them, that they didn’t take her, that she gave herself freely, willingly, readily. It matters that she took the name for herself, that they didn’t cast it upon her, that they didn’t make her into something she never was. It matters that she was the one to give the word its power, that she claimed it; it matters that the pain, the violence, the surrender came by her own tongue, her own hand.

Hers, not theirs.

She let them.

If she hadn’t...

She could have done the most unspeakable things. There are other ways to tear the weapons out of hateful hands, other ways of silencing angry voices. She could have refused them their victory and their reward, could have resisted their threats and challenges; she could have laid that entire city to waste and not lose so much as a drop of her own blood.

 _Demon. Monster_. She could have denied those things and so made them true. Instead, she wore them proudly and so made them a lie.

She’s never had that before.

In all her life, she’s never felt so much like what she is — a _god_ , a vessel for good — than she did in the moment she named herself a demon.

They wanted a monster, and she gave them one. Not through acts of violence or hatred, but through surrender and selflessness and sacrifice.

The body bled, but the soul was spared.

It matters.

To her, at least, it matters.

But Tripitaka is looking at her like it doesn’t matter at all, like she doesn’t care why Sandy accepted the name and the pain, like she wouldn’t care even if she had the whole answer, the whole ‘why’. Like nothing matters at all, only the blood on her face, the marks under her clothes, the places where she let them earn their reward.

Tripitaka touches her temple, stinging and damp, and says, “You don’t deserve this.”

Sandy knows that. For the first time in her life, she knows and believes that it’s true.

“It needed to happen,” she says.

Tripitaka studies her closely, quietly, for a long moment. Assessing her expression, gauging the mix of cloudiness and clarity in her eyes, no doubt trying to figure out whether she’s having one of her bad days, her not-making-sense days or whether she should listen to her. Sandy can’t really blame her for being cautious — especially with her head aching the way it is — but a part of her feels a little wounded nonetheless, crushed that even now, after so much time questing and journeying and travelling together, her friends still don’t know when to trust her.

And they wonder why she is so often unable to trust herself.

Finally, still cautious but softer, Tripitaka asks, “Did it help?”

She means, because for all her wisdom and insight she still doesn’t truly understand, _did it help you to work through your feelings about being called a demon?_

Sandy understands this. But that isn’t the question she hears.

She hears—

No.

She _sees_.

Wide eyes, jutting bones, torn clothes. 

A girl hiding in an alley, frightened and confused. Hungry, maybe starving, desperate and lost and lonely. A child, unwilling to leave a dangerous place because her family is there, because she has not yet lost the piece of her heart that still cares, that still feels, that is still capable of love.

Wide eyes, swirling blue-grey: hers, but also _hers_. Jutting bones, starvation and deprivation and the agonies of going through puberty all alone in the dark and the cold. Torn clothes, ripped to shreds by demons in human skin, by monsters that would dare to call her one.

Wide eyes, big with fear but also with hope. Jutting bones, brittle but not broken. Torn clothes, a tangle of tatters, but they can be mended, they can be stitched, they can be fixed.

A child who was never a demon, never a monster, never the nightmare creature that humans see when their dark eyes meet her blues and greys, when their hard, solid bones clash with hers, brittle but unbreakable, when their clean clothes brush against her tangled tatters and become dirtied sullied, tainted, when their lights shine into the shadows and find something unknown and awful.

A child who does not know why being different makes her evil. A child who wants only to survive, who wants only to remember her mother’s smile or her father’s arms.

That child will live. She will learn to hide, learn to keep herself out of sight. She will learn how to endure this new existence, how to hold her body and her mind together, how to survive without warmth, without kindness, without love.

She will learn and she will live, and all because her human hunters found a new demon to slay.

 _Did it help_ , Tripitaka asks, and she has no idea — how could she? — just how many layers there are to that one small question, how many different ways Sandy could answer it.

She sits up, breath burning in her chest, and meets the eyes of a human who has never seen a monster in hers.

“I think it did,” she says, and the tremor in her voice comes not from a demon or a god but from a lost and lonely child. “I think it helped a lot.”

Tripitaka, who always seeks truth, who always asks _why_ and _what_ and _how_ and is never content with half-answers, accepts this one and asks no more.

She rests her thumb against the gash on Sandy’s temple and whispers, plainly, simply, softly: “Good.”

Sandy smiles.

“Yes,” she says, lying back and letting her eyes slide shut. “I am.”

***


End file.
